Reel cool

"Today I learnt the difference between like and love. I like my Skeechers, but I love my Prada backpack."

"But I love my Skeechers."

"That's because you don't have a Prada backpack."

Ten Things I Hate About You (1999)

There are not many other mediums that fashion will deign to jump into bed with, but for film, it makes an exception. Both are hugely visual productions, created on a scale to rival the Titanic, and both industries are famous for rampant egos, mercurial temperaments, and obsessions with what the workaday world would consider to be trivial.

Whatever the reason, fashion and film have enjoyed an unusually close relationship. Fashion dates a film in the best possible way, creating an atmosphere in contemporary films and an era in costume drama, while film can dictate to designers in its turn, persuading them that returning to the last days of disco is the way forward for fashion.

At its best, it's a relationship that makes both partners look their best. More column inches have been devoted to Ann Roth's beautiful costumes in The Talented Mr Ripley than to any of the individual performers. The insouciant pork pie hat that Jude Law's Dickie Greenleaf dons is his way of showing 1950s Italy that he may be a rich American in beautifully cut suits, but he can swing with the best of the jazz scene, while Gwyneth Paltrow's Marge is at ease with both her place in the world and in simple swing skirts, tie-front blouses and floral bikinis. Matt Damon, on the other hand, couldn't look more uncomfortable in a crumpled corduroy suit as the ill-fitting Tom Ripley, while Cate Blanchett's starchy Meredith tries hard to be a bohemian but always wears a hat.

Using fashion to point out the subtleties of class is not a new thing - remember Molly Ringwald's home-made prom dress in Pretty in Pink? - but the way in which Minghella uses fashion as a kind of Greek chorus is particularly finely tuned and deliberate. For him, as for many directors before, fashion is a valuable narrative tool. It's used most often in films which are not set in the present; whether it's Adrien Brody's spiked dog-collar pointing to the burgeoning New York punk scene in Summer of Sam, those trim 1940s suits in The End of The Affair, or Gwyneth Paltrow's empire line dresses in Emma.

Yet increasingly, directors are chosing to change the era in which a period film or book is set. Ever since Baz Luhrman cast out doublet and hose and put his Romeo in a Hawaiian shirt, the works of Shakespeare have been particularly prone to fashion makeovers. Due on the big screen shortly is Kenneth Branagh's new version of Love's Labour's Lost, a musical comedy set in the 1930s. But did he really want to examine the gathering clouds of the second World War, as he claims - or did he just seize the opportunity to dress the girls in fab nipped-in-waist dresses with flowing chiffon skirts and his men in dapper suits?

Later in the year, director Julie Taymor is going to revamp Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and introduce a lot of tight shirts, bondage gear and tattoos as well as a clipped soundbyte title, Titus. The advance stills show a curious resemblance to shots from Alexander McQueen's catwalk shows, and given that McQueen is acknowledged as a master of both spectacle and design, this is no mean compliment.

Fashion has acted as a kind of cultural shorthand ever since legendary Hollywood costume designer Edith Head started to use the actual fashion and designers of the 1950s rather than creating picturesque setpieces. Head was inspired by Christian Dior and Jacques Fath for Elizabeth Taylor's costume in Elephant Walk, and ended up in a dispute with Hubert de Givenchy over credits, such was the debt she owed to the designer. Continuing the trend, Marilyn Monroe's infamous dress in The Seven Year Itch was an off-the-peg number by William Travilla, who ended up designing the costumes for the television series Dallas.

In the 1970s and 1980s the trend for using designers on films really took off. Ralph Lauren did the wardrobe for The Great Gatsby and created a hugely influential look for Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Interestingly, Lauren had also done a stint at Brooks Brothers, whose shirts cropped up in nearly every one of the many American Wall Street movies of the 1980s, playing the role of a kind of yuppie alert. Nino Cerruti also did a lot of costume design during the label-conscious 1980s; Wall Street and Baby Boom were both fitted out by him, while Jack Nicholson looked devilishly handsome in pale pink and white Cerruti linen separates in The Witches of Eastwick.

Undoubtedly fashion began to take too strong a role in the too-much-of-everything 1980s. Such was the attention paid to Giorgio Armani's clothes in 1980's American Gigolo, that Richard Gere wondered "Who's acting in this scene, me or the jacket?" Yet it was probably during this period in film's - and fashion's - history that the roles started to be reversed, and fashion started to be driven by film as much as film was spurred on by fashion.

The usually fastidious high fashion world was driven to grunge, not just by the bandanas and plaid shirts of Nirvana but by the huge popularity of such brat-pack movies as St Elmo's Fire, The Breakfast Club and Singles. Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs spawned a new generation of men wearing sleek suits and shades - expect a similar conversion to sharp dressing when Christian Bale cuts a swathe through Manhattan in the forthcoming ultra-style film version of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.

A couple of seasons ago, the catwalks were full of a kind of disco chic not seen since the 1970s in homage to such films as Last Days of Disco and Boogie Nights, while the autumn/winter 2000 collections are looking ahead to the forthcoming picture of the TV series Charlie's Angels and the biopic of Valley of the Dolls author, Jacqueline Susann, Isn't She Great?.

Of course, such an influence is hard to prove - a film and a collection can often be part of the same zeitgeist, the same swimmy feeling that the 1980s, for example, are so terribly now. Films are often seized upon by hungry fashion editors, looking for something to hang a shoot around - witness all those hippy chic shoots sparked off by Hideous Kinky, the re-creation of Ali McGraw's look in Love Story to tie in with the reemergence of preppy style last year, and the slightly unlikely, but rampant nonetheless, declarations that we would all return to the glamrock era with the release of Velvet Goldmine.

Given that both film and fashion are such hugely theatrical performances, it's hardly surprising they've become such cosy bedfellows. They're both voracious for the next new thing and desperately keen to be edgy; if they can use each other to their own ends, they most certainly will. As budgets on films and catwalk shows get bigger, it's a simple case of survival of the prettiest.