Fashioning the individual and society in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth and its film costume and fashion representations

Abstract

The proposed paper concerns with fashion and clothing as visual and semiotic signifiers of both the individual and society in William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth and its representations in other media: film (costume design) and haute couture (fashion design). As such, the language of fashion and the vestimentary frame of Shakespeare's tragedy are used as tools for visual and semiotic reading of sociocultural anxieties between the individual and the society as expressed through art. Given rich symbolic and metaphoric value of the language of fashion in Macbeth through which Shakespeare conceptualises his characters and their relationships with the societal framework they inhabit, the paper will thus demonstrate how such a relationship can be conveyed through film costume and fashion design. Analysed representations will consider costume design by Jacqueline Durran for Justin Kurzel's film Macbeth (2015) and fashion design by Alexander McQueen and his collection The Widows of Culloden (2006). In such analysis, fashion is, as fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson defines it, seen as a cultural metaphor for the body and the material with which we write or draw a representation of the body into our cultural context.