Jennifer Richards

Within the first three lines of Philip K Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), we find the first reference to fashion: ‘A merry little surge of electricity piped by automatic alarm from the mood organ beside his bed awakened Rick Deckard. Surprised - it always surprised him to find himself awake without prior notice - he rose from the bed, stood up in his multicolored pajamas, and stretched’. Beginning with Dick’s book and following on from the subsequent impact of the film, the fashion industry has been inspired by Blade Runner’s sartorial style as it has become a regular source of inspiration for such influential fashion designers as Alexander McQueen, Raf Simons and Gareth Pugh. McQueen’s Givenchy Autumn/Winter 1999 Ready-to-Wear collection and Pugh’s Autumn/Winter 2006 Ready-to-Wear collection both draw on the film’s noir and cyberpunk aesthetics such as the 1940s inspired wardrobe and fur coat worn by Rachael (Sean Young). This chapter will, in contrast, consider the impact of menswear within the Blade Runner Universe, drawing on the original 1982 film and concluding with Denis Villeneuve’s Bladerunner 2049 (2017). It will argue that in their choice of clothing and the garments that they wear have clearly had a significant impact on menswear within popular culture and this gap in critical reflection from a fashion perspective is therefore a rich area of study to interpret and analyse. Although there are many opportunities to delve deeply into menswear clothing of the Bladerunner universe, this chapter will focus on one garment in particular – the over coat. This item will be examined to explore the importance of the sartorial choices of specific characters and how these items of clothing offer clues to the character’s personality traits, experiences, and emotions.

• In the three films around which this chapter focuses its thesis, the central young woman protagonist is stylised as the contemporary incarnation of Gothic heroine par excellence: she is psychologically traumatised, or vulnerable, she is inexperienced, naïve but aspiring; she is the white, petite, blonde ingenue who is presented to us as exceptional and coloured as singular, as Othered and alienated from her family and wider society. Satan clearly has ‘a type’ insofar as these twenty-first-century film texts provide a reflection of the cultural afterlives of the traditions of white colonial Gothic literature and the female Gothic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, as argued by Per Faxneld (2014), such texts also provided narratives of feminist liberation via satanic inculcation. From the dual perspective of Queer Gothic studies and Fashion studies, this chapter aims to reconcile the level of feminist liberation available to Thomasin (The VVitch), Jesse (The Neon Demon), and Dani (Midsommar) and, in turn, available to the spectator, with each film’s use of queerbaiting and misogynistic tropes. The chapter will chart how each of these films presents a stylised performance of exceptional femininity, it will consider how these films reflect the male gaze, and it will contend that the satanic liberation extant is an uneasy and profoundly ambivalent thing.