The Immortality of Dracula’s Fashion: the Man Behind the Cape

Abstract

In the cinematic landscape, the depiction of characters arose from the personal envisioning of the movie creators. The processes of masculinization and de-masculinization partially are in the costume designer's hands, who build up the characters’ fashion, identity and gender through dress. Their choice of design reflects upon their subjective and own perspectives of the world. However, the relationship between fashion and film is more layered and involves a great amount of creatives during the production, who equally contribute to the movie’s outcome. It is crucial to stress the importance of the fashioned reality of cinema in which costume plays a fundamental role, in embodying one’s identity. Creative works may be an expression of a vision but are not of a single interpretation and occupy a multidimensional space of negotiated meanings. Roland Barthes's theorization about the multidimensional space highlights the subjectivity and the creator's interpretations, which don’t necessarily define the truth. Taking Barthes's rhetorical structure as a starting point for this paper, and the cultural reproduction of menswear in cinema will unpack the theoretical expression  Weltanschauung, which describes a world's view by creatives in the literary and visual arts. This personification in cinema marks the importance of the industry’s creatives and conveys their inputs on the visualization of race, gender and identity. Furthermore, it reflects on the relevance of fashion at large but also how masculinity shifts in culture and its social significance through the cinematographic landscape.