Lights, Camera, Fashion

How does social media alter the way we consume fashion cues from our favourite TV shows and movies?

- AARON KOK

It starts off as simple and as familiar as this: you're bored one weekend, scrolling through an endless bank of TV shows and movies to watch. Something catches your eye about a series that has just premiered and you hit play.

Four hours later, you emerge from the rabbit hole having found a new TV binge that will consume your interests. You're curious about the actors and their past projects, about the plot twists, and even look up the clothing that the characters are wearing because in your mind, these outfits feel equally attainable and aspirational. You pull up Tik Tok, search for videos on how to emulate the character you're newly obsessed with, and off you go into another rabbit hole of shopping hauls, core-driven trends and so on.

Sound familiar? You're in good company then.

For years now, fashion has been a bedfellow of television and film. What we see on the screens have always-whether consciously or otherwise, directly or indirectly been a reference point for the ways that we shop and dress.

Fashion sits at the very centre of contemporary life, and artists and designers play leading roles in constructing images and meaning, says Elisa De Wyngaert, the curator at the Mode Museum in Antwerp.

She points out how the waif-chic look of the '90s was a clear example on the confluence of culture, screen and the way we dress, saying that against the backdrop of a recession, fragile-looking models with messy makeup and listless expressions appeared not only in photography, but also in fashion shows. This emergence was also further popularised by the likes of contemporary movies such as Trainspotting.

Carlos Rosario, who recently bagged an Emmy for his work on the epic period drama Shogun, tells us that this symbiotic relationship between what we see on screens and how we dress makes complete sense.