Pamela Church-Gibson

Pamela Church-Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has published extensively on film, fashion, fandom, history and heritage; recent books include Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations, Analysis (with Stella Bruzzi, Routledge, 2013) and Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Bloomsbury, 2012).

She is the Principal Editor of the journal Film, Fashion & Consumption, which she founded in 2012. In the same year, she hosted the first conference of the European Popular Culture Association and became its first President.

She is now editing a new series for Edinburgh University Press and has concurrently begun a new monograph for the same press, on the screen spies of the 1960s and their impact on images of masculinity past and present.

She is also embarking on a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project, which will involve heritage and history, cities and consumption, music and spectacle.

Keynote Presentation - Fashion, Celebrity and Ageing: Three Documentaries

Over the last twenty years, the 'fashion documentary ' has become a cinematic staple. This has coincided with an ever-increasing public interest in fashion and celebrity, interdependent now as never before. These films vary in content and intention, ranging from the informative and analytical to the hagiographic.

This paper will look in particular at three documentaries which focus not only on fashion and celebrity, but take as their subject older figures in the fashion world - Valentino: The Last Emperor ( US, Matt Tynauer, 2008 ), Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (UK , Lorna Tucker , 2018) and Iris (US, Robert Maysles, 2014 ). These three films are arguably different in every way, but considered together they provide considerable insight into the relationship between the fashion industry and celebrity culture. More significant, perhaps , is the fact that the process of ageing, seemingly ignored by 'fashion' and problematic within 'celebrity culture' , is central to each film.