Transnational celebrity and the fashion icon: The case of Tilda Swinton,‘visual performance artist at large’

The star as cultural intermediary

The European star has long served as a cultural intermediary, marked by his or her ability to cross borders and transgress categories, as meticulously documented in the volume Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood – A Critical Companion, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau (2006). With the decline of Hollywood studios in the 1960s as a nationally dominated production system and the concomitant rise of an international system, coarsely referred to as the Conglomerates, the role of the star has only increased in scope and importance, enhanced by a proliferation of niches and media platforms. Within this larger system, Tilda Swinton, the persona that she has produced, and the means through which it circulates as the expression of a new plastic European identity, offers an example of film stardom that, while constructed as exceptional as part of its appeal, also illustrates a number of attributes that speaks to the nature of contemporary European identity as irrevocably defined by border crossing, a term with which Swinton has been routinely associated, most recently in an extended article by film and popular culture scholar Jackie Stacey (2015).

American director Wes Anderson describes Swinton as ‘a sort of visual performance artist at large in the world’, underlining how her performance off-screen is as significant as her work on-screen, blurring the boundaries between her work and her life, between art and ‘being’ (Riley, 2014: 34). Anderson’s remark, in underlining the links between performance on-screen and performance off-screen, points to how contemporary celebrity, arguably, models the centrality of what philosopher and art historian Boris Groys calls ‘self-design’ within contemporary culture, in which the subject has ‘an obligation . . . to see him- or herself as an artist’, with the consequence that we are ‘condemned to being the designers of our own selves’ (Groys, 2010: 19). One of the functions, then, of celebrity may be to model this process of ‘self-design’. In the case of Swinton, through her emphasis on disguise as an acting technique in her films and her chameleon-like capacities for self-transformation, she exemplifies an idealized process of self-creation while raising questions about its authenticity, embodying the intersection between identity and impersonation. She herself comments, ‘The thing that keeps me being a performer is my interest in society’s obsession with identity . . . because I’m not sure that I really believe identity exists’ (Saner, 2015).

Fundamental to her persona is her status as a fashion icon, in which her performance embodies the ‘double-voice’ (Hollinger, 2012: 42) that Jeanine Basinger attributes to the woman’s picture of classical Hollywood, which Basinger describes as ‘two-faced’ (Basinger, 1993: 23), giving women both a fantasy of a more fulfilled life while upholding a conservative, pro-social stance that confirms the necessity of a patriarchal and capitalist system. ¹ Although photographs of Swinton in high-fashion garments are ubiquitous, from edgy publications like AnOther to tabloids like the Daily Mail or People Magazine, she denies an interest in, or knowledge of, contemporary style. Her simultaneous embrace and rejection of fashion echoes philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin’s famously contradictory position in that domain (Wollen, 2003). This analogy is neither a passing resemblance nor a complete isomorphic reproduction, the embodiment of an idea in the figure of a contemporary celebrity. Rather, Benjamin’s position offers a heuristic device through which to explore the various meanings that fashion and celebrity, increasingly inextricably linked as Pamela Church Gibson has demonstrated (Church Gibson, 2011), might hold within contemporary culture.

Fashion and modernity

Along with the social theories of Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Walter Benjamin’s cultural analyses, generated during the first half of the twentieth century, posited fashion as producing a significant social and cultural form, rather than functioning solely as meaningless feminine distractions. While for Simmel and Veblen, fashion served a largely regulatory social function, Benjamin’s perspective on fashion was paradoxical and inconsistent. According to noted film and cultural studies scholar Peter Wollen, ‘he veered between viewing fashion, on the one hand, as a manifestation of commodity culture – or, more specifically, of commodity fetishism – and, on the other hand, as the manifestation of a long-repressed utopian desire, to be reenergized at a moment of historical awakening’ (Wollen, 2003: 131). Benjamin’s engagement with fashion derives from its specificity as a phenomenon linked to modernity in which clothing was no longer ‘subject to fixed sartorial codes, through which prestige and distinction were distributed according to rank’, as was the case under the pre-modern ancien régime (Wollen, 2003: 133). As explained by Wollen, drawing on Veblen, ‘The new system was one that required an ability to discriminate, to make judgments of taste. Within this new system, wealth rather than rank as such became important, but also the ability to deploy wealth, through fashion, as a form of symbolic capital, one that attracted both attention and envy, as well as respect’ (Wollen, 2003: 133). Fashion affirmed the capacity of the commodity to confer meaning and status (as a form of commodity fetishism), but it also looked to the past as a means of imagining a better future. Fashion expressed a particular kind of image, ‘wish images’ in Benjamin’s terms, tied to an inherent utopianism as a dimension of ‘the collective consciousness’ (Benjamin, 1999: 4, 893).

For Benjamin, fashion is an expression of a desire for a better future that then derives its specificity from the past. Fashion sets itself in opposition to the recent past, expressing a dissatisfaction with its consequent present. Yet fashion also references a more distant past, in which it finds the seeds of a kind of classless society, a utopia, to which the subject aspires. Fashion must change because the inadequacies of the present (which quickly become the recent past) make themselves felt to the degree that the collective fails to address ‘the inadequacies of the social organization of production’ (Benjamin, 1999: 4). This utopian dimension of fashion emphasized by Benjamin, the way it displays ‘a possibility of messianic redemption’, is offset by his view that fashion was an ‘object lesson in commodity culture’, related to death because of its ‘cyclical nature’, but also because of its links to the body, ‘which it both conceals and aims to renovate, by association with its own novelty’ (Wollen, 2003: 142, 138).

From Benjamin’s perspective, fashion offers instances of border crossing, defined as the transgressing of received cultural categories, for the purpose of interrogating their status. Fashion is an exemplary form of commoditization whereby objects come to ‘stand in’ for intimate and other forms of social relations. Fashion, however, also depends upon an interpenetration of the old and the new, signalling the ways in which this dream of utopia depends not upon a forgetting or an evacuation of the past but upon being able to remember it, of allowing its moments of possibility to feed the future. Thus, though the romantic nineteenth-century ideal of a companionate marriage, as evoked in contemporary wedding dresses, and the discourse through which it was generated were tied to a larger ideological agenda that functioned to keep women in their place within a patriarchal symbolic order, this ideal also incorporated a degree of utopianism, a desire for relations based on parity and equality (Coontz, 2005).

Tilda Swinton’s performance as a fashion icon and how this role plays itself out in two of her recent films (I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino, 2009 and Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch, 2013), films in whose genesis she was intimately involved, offer pertinent examples of Benjamin’s perspective on fashion as having a ‘double-voice’ that paradoxically supports a particular hegemonic structure while fuelling the need to question its validity from an ethical position. In this sense, Swinton embodies a particularly European identity as fragmented and unresolved through her ‘performance’ as a specific persona, in this case, as a fashion icon, a role that she both embraces and denies.

Tilda Swinton as fashion icon

By 2016, Swinton’s rich and enormously productive career spanned four decades, so ascribing a single meaning to any of her many public personas would be a fruitless task. In an article published in 2015, film scholar Jackie Stacey notes: ‘As a performer, actor, producer, activist, model, patron advocate and general style icon, she has appeared in around 70 films, 40 plays and numerous live performances and organized nearly 50 impromptu rural film screenings’; perhaps as a consequence Stacey asserts that ‘flux and mutability have become her signature qualities’, with androgyny one of her defining features (Stacey, 2015: 245, 243). This androgyny is highlighted in her role as a fashion icon, without disassociating fashion from its historical links to femininity. ² An attempt like that proposed by Richard Dyer in his seminal work on classical Hollywood stars (Holmes, 2005), to summarize or crystallize a single meaning or set of meanings to define Swinton’s star persona, cannot adequately encompass the form of stardom that Swinton represents. She embodies a model of stardom that characterizes the late twentieth century and early twentieth-first century, in which celebrities constitute independent franchises, and must constantly present themselves as inherently multi-faceted and transformative for the purposes of marketing themselves, rather than the films in which they appear (King, 2003; Marshall, 2014).

In spite of this general diffusion of meaning, Swinton’s persona follows distinct paths, creating threads of association that are consistent. Swinton’s relationship with fashion is one such thread, emerging with a certain insistence in the past 20 years, notably strengthening as she ages, with the advent of Sandro Kopp as her partner and informal manager in 2004. By 2010, she is regularly referenced as a ‘celebrity fashion maven’, alongside other public figures like ‘Rihanna and Victoria Beckham’ off-setting her famous androgyny (Warrington, 2013).

Swinton herself is much more ambiguous about her relationship with fashion, a relationship Diane Solway characterized in W Magazine – a high-fashion publication – as ‘her subversive, playful public outings’ (Solway, 2011). Swinton claimed in her discussion with Solway that, with the release of The Beach (2000), which she portrays as her first significant foray into mainstream film, she was required to make appearances on the red carpet. In other words, her professional domain began to extend into a public arena, beyond her performances as an actress. Scholars such as Christine Geraghty have pointed out that female celebrities must rely upon being famous for a lifestyle (as opposed to their professionalism) far more frequently and far more insistently than do their male counterparts (Geraghty, 2007: 196). Fashion and the red carpet provided Swinton with a suitably feminine outlet through which to burnish her niche celebrity and the public perception of her lifestyle while maintaining her famously androgynous persona. She paradoxically privatizes a largely professional impulse (the need to appear on the red carpet in the context of certain mainstream roles) by making fashion a matter of personal relations.

In response, then, to this new-found professional obligation (the red carpet), she called upon Jerry Stafford, a ‘friend’, but also ‘the creative director of a French production company’, to advise her. Through him she met designers such as Victor Horsting and Rolf Sneren, Alber Elbaz, Haider Ackermann, Stefano Pilati, Phoebe Philo and Raf Simons, all up-and-coming high-profile designers, who also became ‘friends’, and with whose designs she has come to be associated. According to Solway: ‘It’s these friendships, says Swinton, that lead her into fashion’ (Solway, 2011).

In another interview, in response to the question ‘What is your perspective on fashion?’, Swinton explains: ‘For me personally, I wear exactly what I wanted to wear, whenever I have to put anything on. And I’m very fortunate in that I have a number of great friends who make clothes and they give me them, or lend them to me. Sometimes they ask for them back, and sometimes they don’t’ (Elfman, 2010). On another occasion she elaborated: ‘I’m not even sure that I have a love for fashion, to be perfectly honest with you. My relationship with fashion is entirely based on my relationship with various individuals and friends of mine who happen to make the work. If I didn’t have those friendships, I would not be invited to their shows or even invited to wear their clothes. I don’t follow fashion. I still have – and am happy to retain – a beginner’s mind’ (Matusik, 2014). In another interview, she remarked referring to her fashion ‘friends’: ‘and if they didn’t make me beautiful stuff and send and lend it to me, I would probably be in an old pair of corduroy trousers. I’m dressed by FedEX’ (Moore, 2012).

Though Swinton does not identify with fashion, neither does she dismiss it, seeing it as integral to the performance, to the red carpet as ‘the circus’, such that she never feels upstaged or trivialized by the public interest in fashion. ‘That’s part of the circus too. That’s what the moment is an opportunity for. I would much rather have people looking at my shoes than me. It’s a way of deflecting attention. It’s also a way of sharing the moment, say with . . . Marco Zanini or Haider Ackermann or Chanel or whomever I am hand-in-hand with on that bit of carpet. It’s a way to be in company’ (Matusik, 2014). For Swinton, then, the emphasis is on friendship, camaraderie and companionship, in which she sees herself as collaborating with these various friends for a particular performance, here on the red carpet, which is by nature transient.

Dressing up for the Oscars is an extension of her interest in disguise as the crucial element in the construction of character in whatever film she may appear, rather than achieving authenticity in Veblen’s sense as an individual of discernment and taste (Wollen, 2003). For Swinton, a character evolves out of the external choices of dress and the general transformation of those appearances in which she engages to create a role. ³ Elizabeth Shockman, for Public Radio International, explains: ‘The actress is also noted for the many startling transformations she’s undergone for her different roles’ (Shockman, 2016). Swinton elaborates: ‘That’s a really important part of my process. One of the few things I actively do is create a new shape. I mean, I have a deep dissatisfaction with, in an audience, with seeing people in more than one film. I feel if you’re going to be in more than one film – which, I mean, I have broken my own rule, I broke my own rule in 1986 when I made my second film so, you know, I’m a hypocrite. But being a hypocrite, it occurs to me that you might as well try and present a new face as often as you can’ (Tilda Swinton quoted in Shockman, 2016).

While Swinton’s acting technique is at odds with the trend among most contemporary stars to construct a stable persona recognizable from role to role, she understands the professional implications and necessity of appearing and of constantly updating and changing that appearance in order to keep her image alive in the public eye. She does not refuse the traditionally feminized role of providing a spectacle for her fans or of cultivating the qualities of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, typically more intensely associated with the female star than her male counterparts. These requirements exist independently of the roles, usually paid, as a brand ambassador for the likes of the Italian jewellery firm Pomellato, the make-up line Nars, for the couture house Chanel, among others, which add to her relatively meagre income from her film roles (by Hollywood standards), keeping in mind that she appears to be the main source of financial support for a bevy of persons surrounding her, including her children, partner, former husband, the village alternative school her children attend, etc.

With regard to the documentation of her public appearances (as opposed to advertisements in which she features, which are reproduced across multiple media platforms), it is very difficult to find her wearing the same ‘outfit’ more than once (even when she is purportedly off-duty in her numerous candid shots circulated by publications such as the Daily Mail). As a contrast, she consistently makes the point herself that she lives most of her life with her family in a remote Scottish village, in spite of her media appearances. Here then she espouses a philosophy close to that of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ as defined by Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006: xv), as distinct from transnational feminism, as associated with Virginia Woolf’s oft-repeated dictum, ‘as a woman, I have no country. . . . As a woman, my country is the whole world’ (Woolf, 1938: 109).

In an interview Swinton insisted: ‘Oh, I’m very rooted in Scotland. That’s the only place I live . . . I live in the highlands of Scotland, and that’s my children’s home, and that’s where I go whenever I can. I’m never away from it for longer than six weeks’, highlighting her country life as the defining location from which she takes her identity and its ties to her definitive role as a mother (Elfman, 2010). She told New York Magazine, in 2011, when asked whether as ‘a fashion icon’ people sent her clothing: ‘very kind people, yes. And more than I can use – I live on a farm.’ In yet another interview she describes her own cloakroom (a topic of discussion because of her recent performance piece ‘The Cloakroom’) as containing: ‘six pairs of gum boots, a pair of ancient trawler man’s loafers, one velvet slipper, a can of diesel for the car, three macs, nine ponchos bought on impulse in Mexico – rarely worn and never regretted – four puffy jackets, two schoolbags, six stripy cushions for the lawn, and a framed placard written by my friend Mark Cousins from our film festival saying, “There is a light that never goes out” ’ (Brown, 2015; Madsen, 2015). Notwithstanding her frank descriptions, images of her in that environment are hard to find, as are pictures of her two children, heightening the ways in which her public appearances take on the status of performances in their own right, authenticated as such through references to this off-stage persona who remains nebulous and ill-defined in visual terms, though typically linked very strongly with her role as a mother. Swinton herself participates actively in the creation and mise-en-scène of her public performances as a fashion icon that distance her from the kinds of typically maternal and female images associated with motherhood.

Stafford, who has continued to work with Swinton over the years and is described as her stylist (Popsugar, 2011) explained: ‘We were adamant about collaborating on a level that puts fashion on the same plane as the other arts . . . I emphasize it as a collaboration. It was never about lining up a bunch of frocks on a rail, or kowtowing to fashion. We’re looking for something that goes beyond fashion, trying to take it further than the normal aesthetics of beauty. It’s all about storytelling’ (Saner, 2015). Because, for Swinton, creating a character is about disguise, the transformation of appearance, the transmutation of accent and the realignment of gesture, she collaborates on the costuming of her characters much more actively than might be the case for other actors and actresses. Thus, the involvement of Raf Simons in designing her wardrobe for Io sono l’amore (I Am Love) (Luca Guadagnino, 2009) arose out of previous longstanding ties, with Simons consistently listed among those designers she considers her friends. In many ways, the film offers the most striking testimony to the contradictory relationship that Swinton maintains with the contemporary fashion world.

I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009): Displaced Europeans in Europe

Given Swinton’s sustained involvement in the genesis and development of this film and her own attitudes, its relations with fashion are not surprisingly vexed and contradictory. Fashion scholars and fans have routinely seen Simons’ designs as a visual manifestation of the central character ‘Emma’, as played by Swinton, and her interior development. Originally Russian, ‘Emma’, married to a scion of Milan’s industrial elite, has spent the last 30 years conforming to her husband’s requirements in term of class and gender as a means of fitting into a society where she remains essentially an outsider. With her children grown and beginning their own relationships outside the family, ‘Emma’ embarks on a journey of self-discovery that leads to a romantic liaison with one of her son’s friends. When her son dies in a tragic accident she leaves her husband and family to find solace in her lover’s arms. Her break with her family appears definitive, but ‘Emma’s’ future remains uncertain at the film’s conclusion.

In the course of the film ‘Emma’s’ wardrobe, designed by Raf Simons for Jil Sander, is routinely read as reflecting her internal journey. Karen de Perthius, for example, notes that the ‘film constructs Emma through her costume . . . by weaving together the intersecting discourses of fashion and film’. Drawing upon Stella Bruzzi and Jane Gaines, de Perthius explains that, while ‘Emma’ wears clothing that serves a role in ‘performing emotional exteriority’, she also ‘always appears to be simply “wearing clothes” ’; however, because her costumes include ‘designer clothes, iconic luxury labels and distinctive jewelry’ that are ‘recognizable fashion objects’, her clothing also has a meaning beyond that which it serves within the film’s narrative, which has already been culturally inscribed before the film begins (de Perthius, 2012: 275, 274). De Perthius’s views on the role of clothing in the film are echoed by fashion journalists and bloggers, who were typically enthusiastic about the film as displaying contemporary fashion. Generally, however, they also attributed a narrative and even philosophical function to the clothing, beyond their general appreciation. One blogger commented on how the fashions of the film, which was meant to take place in 2000, were both contemporary, 2009, and nostalgic, evoking how fashion was both intimately tied to a particular chronology while existing outside that chronology (Lugli, 2011). These comments recall Benjamin’s reflections on fashion’s non-linear relations to history, which disrupts to an extent any literal or definitive interpretation of the meaning of clothing within the film as either about contemporary fashion (though many of the designs were sold as such) or character, an opacity and state of fragmentation encouraged by Swinton herself, who offers multiple interpretations.

Swinton herself posited ‘Emma’s’ appearance as communicating the anxiety of someone who comes from elsewhere and has to make a particular effort to learn the local codes knowing that if she ‘wore the wrong shoes’ she would perhaps ‘not be invited to the dinner the following week’ (Elfman, 2010). She added in another interview: ‘She has to learn the codes and so her wardrobe, to a certain extent, is everything’ (Ouyang, 2010). She elaborated in yet another interview, ‘My character’s wardrobe was designed exclusively by Raf Simons of Jil Sander. We wanted to have completely cohesive, sort of organic, expressionist costume for her, so in the scene where she falls in love, she has a red dress, and we have that sense that when she’s in the dress at the end with the son, when she goes to the hospital, it subtly changes color to a darker shade of gray’ (Elfman, 2010).

Concomitantly, Swinton places strong emphasis on ‘Emma’s’ ultimate rejection at the film’s conclusion of the luxury brands, including her clothing by Raf Simons for Jil Sander, and the life that these represent, underlined within the film. For Swinton these objects embody the homogenization of culture and a loss of individuality, in particular location as a dimension of identity. Swinton explained: ‘It is possible to walk into a rich person’s house in any city in the world and find the same make of candles, or the same shoes. I find it a waste of cultural specificity and history and myth making, and I would so much rather walk into someone’s house, however much money they have, and feel that I’m actually connecting with the culture of that place and the people who live in that place’ (Ouyang, 2010). For Swinton, the Italian style that the film repeatedly celebrated testified not to the specificity of national identity, but to the global appetite for luxury items in which nationality becomes a function of taste rather than individual identity. Ironically, both Raf Simons and Jil Sander hail not from Milan (where the line is located) but from Belgium and Germany, another mark of the transnationality inscribed through the film, echoing that of its heroine ‘Emma’, who lives as an Italian but hails from Soviet Russia.

In this sense, the film seems destined for an international audience, particularly an American audience, who will admire Italian style as something exotic, rare and, thus, at least temporarily, fashionable. Indeed, a number of the dresses designed to be worn by ‘Emma’ were shown as part of the Raf Simons for Jil Sander designer line and sold extremely well. At the same time, Swinton’s uncoiffed hairstyle, her baggy t-shirt and boyfriend track pants at the film’s conclusion, continue to enjoy increased popularity on the street among what the New York Times describes as ‘the grungy cool kids of Paris’, the muses of designers such as Demna Gvasalia (a Georgian who trained in Antwerp) who is behind the cult brand Vêtements, and who replaced Alexander Wang as creative director at the canonical haute couture house Balenciaga in October 2015 (Paton, 2015).

Another fundamental thread in the film is its focus on other senses beyond ‘seeing’, in particular taste, as a means of apprehending the world, which moves the viewer away from what Martine Beugnet terms ‘optical modes of vision’ as a form of social control, linked to capitalism and commodity fetishism, to consider other modes of experience (Beugnet and Mulvey, 2015: 194). Initially, ‘Emma’ appears to submit to these regimes as offering her the tools through which she survives by appearing to be the perfect wife of a wealthy man in a culture that is not her own. In one scene, frequently singled out in the movie by viewers, ‘Emma’ tastes a dish, prepared by her soon-to-be lover ‘Antonio’; the intensity of this experience challenges the integrity of ‘Emma’s’ carefully constructed persona, which she has been presenting to the world since leaving the Soviet Union, 30 years earlier, a world to which she can never return because it no longer exists. This experiential or emotional fissure serves as the trigger in a series of events that will culminate in ‘Emma’s’ discovery of a self and set of feelings that she had locked away in order to conform to the norms of appearance required by her husband.

This scene illustrates how the conundrum of fashion as described by Walter Benjamin permeates contemporary culture’s relationship to the image as a crucial element in the commodity system. In evoking the world of the senses, an explicitly primal world associated with childhood and an uncontaminated pleasure in the present, the moment recalls a past, conjuring up a ‘wish image’ with regard to another form of being that may have existed once, but which is constantly under threat within the present. ‘Foodies’, consumers who fetishize particular kinds of food, ways of cooking and rituals of eating with a view to intensifying the experience of taste, are equally prey to fashion (as represented in the film) and do not exist outside the world that also includes haute couture and designer ready-to-wear.

Insofar as taste, however, metonymically connects the viewer with another phenomenological mode in a much stronger and emphatic way than does clothing, it is also a site of resistance to a contemporary world in which appearance and its reproduction and a concomitant optical mode of vision across a number of media platforms have become a necessity for increasing numbers of subjects and their cultural survival. Taste must always imply a way of feeling things differently that is intimately connected to the body as the site of sensations. Thus, significantly, taste is the sense that serves as the trigger that will reawaken ‘Emma’ to the world of feeling, a world against which fashion has constituted an elaborate defence throughout her marriage. Notably in this scene, as ‘Emma’ savours the dish, the camera develops a different relationship with the image, which is fragmented, inviting the viewer to call upon the memory of other senses, in this case taste, to evoke a different kind of experience than the controlled distance associated with optical modes of vision, which work to exclude other modes of experience in favour of the visual. Not coincidentally, Swinton links the two phenomena: food and fashion, highlighting how fashion can have another phenomenological status than that accorded by optical modes of vision (with which it is typically associated). She explains: ‘For someone to know what you need to make you comfortable, they need to know who you are. Having them make clothes for me is like being cooked for by someone who knows what you like to eat’ (Solway, 2011).

The thread of fashion as a link between Swinton’s off-screen and on-screen personas is not confined to I Am Love, though this film offers a particularly potent example of Swinton’s engagement with the construction of public persona in this arena. Arguably this thread or set of associations manifests itself in one way or another implicitly or explicitly, across the various media through which she presents her public self, as in her recent performance pieces with Olivier Saillard (Madsen, 2015), extending into her roles in other films, even those that position themselves against the art-house, luxury-brand standard created by Guadagnino, sustained in his more recent collaboration with Swinton, A Bigger Splash (2015).

Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013): Europeans abroad

Jim Jarmusch, described by The Guardian as a ‘hipster’ and ‘without a doubt the most rock’n’roll of filmmakers’ (Romney, 2014), as a director enjoys a reputation that stands in stark contrast with that of Guadagnino, with his connections to European luxury brands and Old World Culture. Yet, Only Lovers Left Alive (Jarmusch, 2013) suggests the tenacity of Swinton’s current status as a fashion icon. Only Lovers Left Alive, like most of Swinton’s projects, was the product of a sustained relationship between Swinton and the director. She had already appeared in films directed by him, with Only Lovers Left Alive her third collaboration. Significantly, Jarmusch is American. Swinton described his importance to film culture in the following terms: ‘For my generation of European film nerds, he was pretty much the first who showed us America through the eyes of an American alien.’ Subsequent to his feature Stranger than Paradise (1984), Jarmusch in Tilda’s words ‘has been a consistent North Star for me . . . a reliable idiosyncratic bass note under the anthem of generic sounding around him’, ‘North Star’ being a term that Swinton has also used in reference to her father and David Bowie (Ryzik, 2014). While Swinton’s perception of Jarmusch posits him as unwaveringly positive figure in her life, in fact Only Lovers Left Alive had a fraught production history.

Jarmusch shot the film digitally as a consequence of being ‘hemmed in by financing’; the role originally conceived for Michael Fassbinder was eventually played by Tom Hiddleston; while Sony Pictures Classic ultimately distributed the title, original funding was from Cyprus, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The production might be described as an independent American film (shot in Michigan, Germany and Morocco) with a Euro-pudding funding profile, the product of significant border crossings, in a literal sense (Ryzik, 2014). Investors’ reticence was not ill founded; the film was well received critically, but its box office barely recovered its initial budget. (I Am Love’s worldwide gross was US$10,965,579 compared to Only Lovers Left Alive at US$7,609,534.) ⁴ Thus, like most of Swinton’s projects, its purpose was artistic and personal rather than financially motivated.

Only Lovers Left Alive revolves around the centuries-old relationship between two globe-trotting vampires, whose own lives literally re-enact the motif of border crossing: ‘Adam’ played by Tom Hiddleston and ‘Eve’ played by Swinton. Atmospheric, rather than plot-driven, the film recounts the couple’s attempts to survive the contemporary world, avoiding both contaminated blood and the unnecessary killing of humans. The film concludes in Tangiers, as the two vampires prepare to murder two young lovers as their only means of survival. The vampire as a narrative conceit within what Jarmusch conceived as a ‘tender romance’, afforded him the opportunity to ‘sneak in an overview of cultural history’ (Ryzik, 2014). Jarmusch’s vampire couple played by Swinton and Hiddleston are disdainful of the present and enamoured by the past – that is a past that they can apprehend at a distance of at least 35 or 40 years, as opposed to the recent past, conflated with the present.

The obsession with the past in the present was literally embodied in the costumes worn by the vampires, all of which were made for the film, which had, thus, no direct connections to the world of fashion. Jarmusch, in particular, unlike Luca Guadagnino (who worked and continues to work repeatedly on fashion-related projects as well as other more personal projects), avoided any involvement with the luxury industry or mainstream culture more generally, contributing to his status as an authentic ‘indie’ director (Newman, 2011: 226). Again, as is often the case with her films, Swinton was intimately involved in the creation of her look, claiming that she and the costume designer ‘always work together very closely. As far as I’m concerned it’s the lion’s share of my work, putting together the disguise. . . . We had such fun putting all the looks together, . . . we had to keep alive that they were living in all centuries at once. So every element, the height of the heel, the substance of the pants, the cut of the jacket had to, or rather needed to not indicate one period. So the jacket might be a bit fifties, a little bit 1530’s, a little bit last season. That feeling of fluidity and lastability was essential and fun to do’ (Gilchrist, 2014).

Notwithstanding its lack of designer credentials, Only Lovers Left Alive was promoted by fashion publications, particularly with a view to its sartorial choices. For example, Vogue’s Patricia Garcia extolled the film’s look: ‘There’s a special kind of nonchalant cool found in every Jim Jarmusch film.’ She continued invoking Swinton and Hiddleston as fashion models: ‘Inspired by their bedhead and their grungy rock-’n’-roll style – there’s a white leather jacket we need in our closets right now – we picked six looks you can make your own.’ Vogue then goes on to detail how the consumer can recreate various outfits worn by the characters by purchasing contemporary garments (Garcia, 2014).

This constantly shifting terrain of fashion’s relations to the historical and to culture more generally suggests the ways in which fashion can incorporate stylistic strategies that reference the past while refusing to define a particular historically contingent location creating an interpenetration of the past and the present that allows for the preservation of a ‘wish image’ from the past in the present that has a particular resonance in terms of European identity. This ‘wish image’ is literally embodied by the vampire couple whose desire to live an ethical and aesthetic life is systematically thwarted by the realities of the contemporary world. Jarmusch sustains the notion of a utopian promise within the film through his obsessive cataloguing of the great works of the past ranging from William Shakespeare’s sonnets to ‘Tesla’s physics’, which, in the words of Jonathan Romney, ‘all becomes rock’n’roll after a fashion, all glamorous grist to his intensely idiosyncratic cinema’. Romney continues: ‘What fascinates Jarmusch in the vampire myth is . . . the educational opportunities afforded by supernaturally extended life’ (2014). This will to knowledge and understanding functions as an extension of the ‘wish image’ articulated through Swinton’s wardrobe as an amalgamation of historical periods figuring the accomplishments of humanity in the past as well as its frailties in the present. In this film, the present is haunted by the evidence of its failure to fulfil the promises of its past. This ‘haunting’, however, does not invoke the senses, as does I Am Love through its use of food and taste, to create a disequilibrium with regard to the ‘optical modes of vision’, associated with capitalism and consumerism, as noted above. In consequence, the vampires’ world remains at a distance, one that is easily recuperated by the aesthetics of glossy magazines, in spite of the director’s consistent efforts to retain his independent status.

Conclusion

In a 2011 interview with Haider Ackermann, Swinton reflected upon what it meant to be a European, uncannily echoing some of the themes that mark Only Lovers Left Alive. She asserted that ‘as a European in Europe one feels the haunting of all the centuries of cultural ghosts that are there, and one has to find a way of placing oneself within the greater course’ (Swinton, 2011). To a degree, both I Am Love and Only Lovers Left Alive speak to that sentiment, most obviously in the later film, which Swinton would have been in the process of developing when she undertook the interview, a process that she claims took eight years (Ryzik, 2014). In both films the actress crosses a number of different borders, both national and historical, to produce yet another series of performances that continue to evoke a persona that is not defined by any single position, but by a quality that emerges out of a continuous process of movement and transformation, of which her relations to fashion are a significant and emblematic strand that contribute to her ability to negotiate her various roles, performing femininity without compromising her talismanic androgyny. This movement, or mouvance (there is no English language equivalent for the French term) suggests how she may come to embody a European identity founded in fragmentation and contradiction, in which borders exist in order than they may be crossed, of which contemporary European fashion constitutes a notable example.