Our first foray into the gilded sanctuary of fashion design doesn’t begin the first time we pick up Vogue as teenagers and learn the fashion parlance of sliding scales, front rows and Kate Moss for Topshop. Ariel’s wedding dress in The Little Mermaid blew my mind a decade before I knew what a toile was or subscribed to the glossy magazine behemoths with (a short-lived) missionary zeal. From Dorothy’s crisp gingham pinafore in The Wizard of Oz to Nastassja Kinski’s back-to-front pink mohair dress in Paris, Texas (via Broadway’s Rodgers and Hammerstein and director Wong Kar-wai) my mind is more etched by celluloid than the new fashion season’s silhouettes. For most people, the Monroes and Hepburns came before the Wintours; before it all got a bit too serious for its own good that is, we had movies.

If there’s a high priestess of the maverick approach to fashion, it’s Diane Pernet, who makes it her appointed duty to remind us that our most visceral responses to clothing are not elicited by gazing up at the blinding glitz and melodrama of fashion shows or down at the motionless sheen of 2D reprints. For Pernet, whose magnum opus, a Shaded View on Fashion Film festival, descends upon the city this January, the moving image is the ultimate canvas to style.

Diane Pernet’s creative credentials are so far-reaching that one’s hard-pressed to pin them down on the page. Her gothic, black-clad and crimson-lipped figure, with trademark Spanish-widow style mantilla looming high like a halo, has been casting its darkly glamorous shadow over the fashion industry for long enough to crystallize a mythical, all-seeing-eye status. Pernet presides over fashion’s most renegade corners, acting as regal patron to their most spirited and roguish offspring.

As a New Yorker in the ‘80s, Pernet made a cult name for herself among film and design circles before lighting out to Paris at the dawn of the ‘90s to carve out a glittering career as a fashion reporter, christened Dr. Diane for her sharply observed runway dressing downs. Upper echelons aside – front row access and stints at Elle and Vogue – it’s her own fashion blog a Shaded View on Fashion for which she has become synonymous, and from which the film festival originally snowballed.  

One of the first fashion blogs, a Shaded View of Fashion pioneered the concept back in quaint, pre-iPhone 2005, when “life blogging” meant Pernet using her mobile phone camera to post grainy missives of fashion wisdom. With the Internet as an autonomous launch-pad for upstart designers on a budget, fashion became quickly democratized. Many megabytes later, and with the blog written into the fashion bible, the seed for ASVOFF festival was sewn in 2006 with a selection of short films popping up at the likes of Copenhagen Fashion Week, Bilbao’s Guggenheim and Antwerp’s MoMu. A roadtrip movie commissioned by Eley Kishimoto to showcase its menswear launch in 2008 spawned Pernet’s first film festival, You Wear It Well. Soon after, the ASVOFF star was born, drawing in pied-piper style along its itinerant way a mighty line-up of participants including Kim Gordon, Nan Goldin, Bruce Weber, Chloe Sevigny and Dita Von Teese, to name but a very few.

As Pernet prepared to set the ASVOFF sail for Caixaforum Barcelona (with Tokyo, Mexico, New York, Cannes, Milan and London already checked off the itinerary), we tracked down the lady in black herself. It was, she tells us, a long-time contribution to design magazine B-guided that fostered her footsteps into the city and brought about the screening of You Wear It Well at Arts Santa Mònica in 2007 as part of the Loop festival. She adds that after reading The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, she was “absolutely was under its spell, so the last time I visited Barcelona I wanted to experience the Gothic area. I loved it and came home with various sizes of skull candles.”

ASVOFF’s four days of fashion shorts comprise the Official selection, in which photographer Miguel Villalobos-designed gongs for best film, designer, actor and band are elected by an illustrious jury and the Students section, as voted by the public. Choosing “Muse” and “Amuse” as 2011’s themes, Pernet explains how the off-beat genius of two maestros in particular has been a constant source of inspiration: “when I was studying film in university, I was crazy about Luis Buñuel’s films… and I have been under the spell of Almodóvar since I saw Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón… he has a real sense of fashion as a strong element used to build his characters.”

Along with the new addition Mobile Fashion Film online competition and a selection from mobile-movie expert Movil Film Fest’s Lorea Iglesias, Pernet is also presenting The Best of ASVOFF, a dazzling curation of previous winners and scene-stealers. Pieces by Mike Figgis featuring Vivienne Westwood and Kate Moss will be shown alongside the irreverent Lust Lust by Martin Grauds, the breakthrough three-time winner at last year’s Paris edition.

And this year’s crop? Pernet says that “the sheer scale and variety have astounded me… everything from uplifting theatrics and cheeky satire… to scenes that are saturated with decadence and luxurious wardrobes… I hope that the public and the jury will be as delighted, haunted, enchanted, challenged and thoroughly entertained by what they see as I have been.” And she hasn’t written off a future collaboration with Almodóvar – “I can dream, can’t I?”

asvoff.es