Fashion and film stories of (mis)understanding: Introduction to a special issue on cinema and fashion

ABSTRACT Cinema is the “the Seventh Art” and cinema is valued socially for its enormous capacity to evoke feelings, awaken consciences, and represent the most sublime of the human spirit and soul. Cinema stories are elaborate constructs of narrative, technical and aesthetic elements whose result is a final product with the antagonistic ability to entertain in an alienating way or even change the thinking of a society regarding a certain issue. Through movies, generations receive aesthetic educations: the way of behaving is learned, the way of speaking and dressing is imitated, an atmosphere of the past is reproduced, trying to represent the Zeitgeist and evoke the great themes that oscillate in each society. Without a doubt, the arrival of cinema into lives in the 20th century marks the ways generations socialize, while forever changing the transmission of ideas, values, and aesthetics.