Funny Face + Q&A

• Duration: 103 minutes
• Director: Stanley Donen
• Country: U.S.A
• Year: 1957
• Rating: (U)

Join us for the first day of the Fashion Revolution Weekend!

Funny Face 
An impromptu fashion shoot at a book store brings about a new fashion model discovery in the shop clerk.
Starring fashion icon par excellence Audrey Hepburn, Funny Face embodies the mythology of fashion's central role in femininity and it transformative power. However, like many popular treatments of fashion, it also contains a critique of the fashion industry and of dominant ideals of white western femininity. The power of fashion media to manipulate female consumers is made explicit and to some extent parodied, yet in the end we are expected to recognise the pleasure and 'naturalness' of fashion's grip on female hope and desire. This film begs the question of how fashion ideology is circulated now, and to what extent and how we might resist its logics, despite our need to go beyond them for the sake of the planet.

For the Q&A after the film, we will be joined by Dr Vanessa Brown, researcher, writer and teacher in the department of Fashion and Textiles at Nottingham Trent University, and Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd, Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University.

Amy is Associate Professor of Fashion and Sustainability at Nottingham Trent University. Her international participatory project, Fashion Fictions, brings people together to generate, experience and reflect on engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems. Other initiatives include Reknit Revolution, a project supporting knitters to rework the items in their wardrobes. Amy has authored and edited several books, including 'Folk Fashion: Understanding Homemade Clothes' (2017).
Vanessa is a researcher, writer and teacher in the department of fashion and textiles at Nottingham Trent University. A career-long critical interest in consumption, waste and the desire to be 'cool' informs all her work. Author of 'Cool Shades: the history and culture of sunglasses', she has also written on coolness and fashionablility, coolness and sustainability, women and girls in film, tv and popular culture, as well as journalism (The Independent) and international media work (e.g. BBC Radio 4, Australia ABC) on adjacent themes, such as the politics of 'cluttercore'.