From Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy, to sharp suited gangsters in Tarantine movies, clothing is central to film. Clothes are not mere accessories, but are key elements in the construction of cinematic identities. Undressing Cinema focuses on the narrative significance of clothes in file, and proposes new and synamic links between cinema, fashion and costume history, gender, queer theory and psychoanalysis. Undressing Cinema explores the difference between the referential relationship of film and fashion, and the notion that clothing, in such films as The Piano and The Age of Innocence , can be a represive or expressive statement of sexuality. Discussing new film noir, the gangster movie and New Black Cinema, Bruzzi analyses assumptions about femininity and masculinity and examines the relationship between gender and dress in recent cinema: the emergence of the modern femme-fatale in Basic Instinct, Disclosure and The Last Seduction ; generic male chic in Goodfellas, Reservoir Dogs, Nikita and Leon ; and pride, costume and masculinity in Malcolm X, Boyz 'N The Hood and The New Jack City .
The concluding chapters further problematise gender identities through a consideration of drag in film, proposing a radical differentiation between the unerotic cross-dressing of Mrs Doubtfire as opposed to the eroticised ambiguity of the androgynous Orlando . Undressing Cinema challenges and reassesses the received notions of costume and fashion in film. It radically departs from conventional interpretations of how masculiity and femininity are constructed through clothes and reconsiders the role dressing up plays in the manufacturing of gender, identity, sexuality and desire.