Style and fashion according to David Lynch How Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks influenced some of the most memorable fashion shows of recent years

In how many ways can an artist be defined? Declining its formation, its artistic intentions, the path to arrive at a certain type of vision. Whatever the art form one chooses to profess, there are many elements that show its evolution, the generative incipit that has determined such a vision of intentions, not necessarily attributable solely to one's own artistic creed. Very often, when analysing the evolutionary and artistic path of a filmmaker, one tends erroneously not to consider, as happens for example in music, how much the aesthetics and the use of one's own clothing has conditioned the periods, themes, and externalization of what the artist actually wanted to show with respect to what his imagination, his own life path, was communicating to him at that time. Just as an original soundtrack has an impact in emphasising and showing the non-verbal language that a director chooses to reveal to his audience, an excursus that is even more interior than the narration itself, so too fashion with its many facets shows new social, artistic visions, inherent in the generalist culture, so much so as to become the perfect synthesis of its artistic flair. If in contemporary filmmakers it is an element that we find again and again, a forma mentis given by an ever-increasing cohabitation of arts in which music, cinema and fashion merge into an aesthetic and sensorial unicum, the father of this fusion is undoubtedly David Lynch in the manifestation of an American dream in which terror and caducity of contemporary society were delineated through a unique and controversial style.

Just hours after the passing of the most influential film genius of our time, we remember David Lynch by tracing his style over the years. From his personal wardrobe to the colors of Blue Velvet, from Twin Peaks influences in collections to Lynch's signature fashion collaborations. 

David Lynch's personal style

Such iconicity has become a fundamental narrative element for multiple shows among which the ever eclectic work of Raf Simons certainly stands out, who for his 2016 FW men's collection, Nightmares and Dreams, dedicated to Lynch's work a true attestation of unconditional esteem not only through the conformation of the clothes that presented the American aesthetic stylistic features that costume designer Patricia Norris had conceived for the series, «destroying the standards and ideals imposed on young people in small-town American societies», but also in the construction of the set in which the models walked in a labyrinth of twisting and turning wooden walls reminiscent of the entrance to the Black Lodge, where only the voice of Angelo Badalamenti, the director's fetish composer, guided the flow, explaining the creative process that had led to the composition of Laura Palmer's theme, without separating Lynch's directorial vision from his sonic ideal.

Lynch's collaborations with the world of fashion

If the fashion world has made use of his aesthetics, the Missoula-born director has been able to enter into them gradually, contributing to the conception of some campaigns that have become iconic over time. The direction of the oneiric short film Lady Blue Shanghai, centred on the iconoclastic imagery of Dior in which the protagonist Marion Cotillard was lost in the Shanghai night, in perpetual conflict between dream and reality, as well as the commercial for Gucci in 2008, without forgetting the artistic direction of the FW Kenzo fashion show in 2014, for which he was the creator of both the set and the soundtrack. Despite the fact that his aesthetic style may seem sober, almost closed in his rural American vision, his directing and sound ideas have always been brazen, multimodal, so much so that they fit perfectly with what the fashion industry is now perfectly externalizing through its collections and its mission, in an increasingly interconnected artistic union.