The Power of Film

Consumer brands have always understood the gargantuan influence of popular culture to set trends and reach consumers. Take film for example: Film acts as a showcase for emergent design trends in fashion, tech, music and art.

The obvious case in point would be Bond films with Tom Ford suits, Omega watches and HP gadgets, but there’s more to film than blatant advertisement: Film is instrumental in conveying the soft power of brands by displaying their designs without necessarily going for the hard sell.

Think of Giorgio Armani with Paul Schraeder’s 1980 American Gigolo, or Yves Saint Laurent with Tony Scott’s 1983 The Hunger, or Jean Paul Gautier with Peter Greenaway’s 1989 The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover.

These films did not brandish their brands in accompanying advertisement, but rather contributed to defining the aesthetics of the age (and manufactured tastes), and they succeeded in doing that because film acts as a design ecosystem where different design disciplines influence and interact with each other. Film can showcase design trends, but film can also incubate innovation in design by allowing different disciplines to collaborate. The Hunger may have exhibited Yves Saint Laurent costumes, but the film also shot to fame the pioneering Gothic Rock band Bauhaus (and the Bauhaus design revival in the 1980s).

The epitome of a well-balanced design ecosystem would be Tom Ford’s films in which fashion, architecture and art coalesce seamlessly.

But what about the consumer commodity with the highest price point: property?

Developers are mostly oblivious to film and other iterations of popular culture, and how harnessing that power can reach much further to target consumers. This is partly because many developers align property with construction rather than with consumerism, but also because the design element of property, architecture, is shielded by architects from dialogue and collaboration with other design disciplines: Architects generally approach film in an insular, vocationally parochial way - only when architecture is the protagonist. This is why most architectural design is out of step with the spirit of the time. This is why architecture is always a vessel or a background rather than an active participant.