Observational à la mode: Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy and the Fashion Documentary

The rhetoric of documentary film has become a staple of fashion marketing. As the influence of magazines has waned in favour of the immediacy of social media, luxury fashion labels have increasingly employed the moving image to offer audiences a glimpse behind the scenes (or “BTS”) into the making of garments, campaigns, and runway shows. Numerous feature-length documentaries, such as The September Issue (2009), Dior and I (2014), The First Monday in May (2016), McQueen (2018), and High & Low – John Galliano (2023), have translated the backstage processes of high-profile fashion companies into cinematic forms that give audiences an impression of access into the working lives of celebrated garment and image-makers. Likewise, those with sartorially oriented algorithms are often fed fleeting insights into how luxury clothing evolves from two-dimensional sketch to three-dimensional product across social media. But what does revealing the making of fashion evoke?