Ghosts and Gowns: The Uncanny Couture of Peter Strickland's 'In Fabric'

“But what if someone died wearing it?”  

        This refrain is familiar to anyone who has a penchant for vintage or pre-loved clothes, usually uttered by a friend whose expression contorts in distaste at the thought of wearing clothes that another person has lived, loved and potentially perished in.  Admittedly, this sort or sartorial squeamishness is becoming less common, as environmental awareness increases and secondhand clothes become items of sustainability, rather than eccentricity.

        And yet it’s a concern that is located at the heart of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), a peculiar film that can be found at the point where the Italian giallo horror genre and David Lynch meet.  The plot, if you will excuse the pun, is threadbare.  There is no comforting three act construction that audiences have gotten used to in their films; no conclusions, no resolution.  Instead, there is a saturated aesthetic quality to the film that bewitches even as it confounds, and the audience must simply accept that the plot revolves around a dress that seems to be – haunted?  Possessed?  - Which was bought at a department store that could be a hellmouth or perhaps the home of a coven of witches.  Viewers are destabilised as shoppers ask the elaborately dressed sales assistant banal questions such as: ‘What size is this?’  And received ritualistic responses like: ‘In a number is only the recreation of actuality. Dimensions and proportions transcend the prisons of our measurements.’  The disorientation intensifies as you frantically try to work out what on earth the assistant just said, even as the shopper on screen nods with the thoughtful confidence of a person who’s just been given a straight answer.  What is going on?

        So, you will not find a typical review of the film here, and thankfully that means you won’t find any spoilers, either.  Instead I want to explore the idea of haunted clothes.  The concept seems ridiculous on the surface and, yet, is no more bizarre than the classic haunted house or the increasingly popular trope of haunted technology (no horror loving millennial will forget the creeping dread of watching the sinister VHS tape of The Ring wreak havoc on its viewers – a dread compounded by the film itself being viewed via a VHS tape.  Or maybe this was just me, and I’m revealing my own vintage).  And of course, a film itself is a form of construction, as Giuliana Bruno considers that a film's surface is ‘configured as an architecture: a partition that can be shared, it is explored as a primary form of habitation for the material world.’  Rather pleasingly, Bruno explores this through sartorial language, describing the action of digging into ‘layers of imaging and threading through their surfaces’ to expose ‘the actual fabrics of the visual: the surface condition, the textural manifestation’ that supports a movie (1).  Films and fabric, ghosts and gowns become enmeshed.

        What, then, are the ingredients of a haunted house?  The death of a previous inhabitant, most probably.  Additionally, there may even be some added flair in the form of a cult, or blood stains, discovered diaries, or lost burial grounds beneath the foundations, but essentially the primary components of a haunting are: a) architecture and b) the end of a life.  Why, then, could a dress not be haunted?  As a covering for the body, it’s possible to position the fabric as another form of wall, a layer between the inhabitant and the outside world, with stitches for bricks and sleeves for windows.  You inhabit a coat in much the same way as you inhabit a house.  And anyone who has ever bought a second-hand item has found relics and reminders of the life of the previous inhabitant hidden amongst its folds: a train ticket in a pocket, a hem that has been raised, or even - God help us - stains.  Clothing becomes a piece of sartorial architecture, and thus your sensitive friend is right to be concerned – what if someone did die wearing that jacket?  What if those shoes once encased a dead person’s feet?  

        Through this lens, clothing becomes symbolic of the ‘abject.’  Julia Kristeva argued that bodily fluids and disgust show us the boundaries of life, that we expel fluids until we, ourselves, are expelled and become objects of death, and that our disgust for such fluids is the same as our disgust for our demise. ‘My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere [to fall], cadaver’ (2).  Considered with this in mind, clothing becomes a bodily waste: we drop a sweat-stained shirt at the end of the day like a cricket climbing out of a carapace, and that same shirt becomes symbolic of our body that will one day fall.  

        And, yes, a film about a dress on the rampage is intrinsically funny, and Strickland doesn’t shy away from the potential for humour in the concept.  But still, there is a darkness in the film and the lavish shooting of the dress, as it undulates as if in water and leaves a trail of destruction in its wake.  We watch the film, and as we do so we are forced to (imaginatively) gaze askance at our wardrobes.  The question is no longer whether an item of clothing could be haunted, but rather, how could it not be?

Written by Alex Carabine

Endnotes

(1) Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) p. 3.

(2) Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) p.3.