Christina Ricci: Four Play With Donna Karan | Clothes on Film – Part 7574

Hollywood starlet Christina Ricci has featured in a short film for The Donna Karan Company called Four Play. It is all to promote their Eldridge handbag.

Christina Ricci, now 29 for all of you old enough to remember her turn in The Addams Family (1991), joins the likes of Marion Cotillard for Dior and Robert De Niro for Chanel (well, Martin Scorsese apparently directing, but wouldn’t that be fun?) in making narrative films to advertise designer wares.

This is opposed to the usual, an A-lister wearing exclusive togs and swanning around some po-mo or CGI fantasy backdrop with a bottle of fragrance nearby and posing. Check out Naomi Watts for Thierry Mugler somewhere on YouTube to see what we mean.

Four Play, directed by Sting’s son Jake Sumner, is perhaps not anything dramatically different or innovative, but at least willing is there in the advertising world to shake things up just a little bit.

High fashion and Hollywood has a long standing collaborative history harking back to Chanel’s foray into designing for the medium in the 1930s, right up to Armani’s recent collection for Duplicity (2009) staring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. Four Play, Dior’s Chapter One film, etc are shorts however, promos really, so the emphasis is arguably far more on product than narrative. Arguably.

Four Play is barely two minutes long and centres entirely on Ricci getting ready for a night out, her personality split into four separate entities: Dreamer, Expressionist, Voyeur and Paramour – as represented by Sumner’s use of split screen (very sixties). It’s a student film really with a massive budget and a Hollywood star on the timesheet.

Though whatever your thoughts on this cross-copulation of artistic merit and cold hard advertising, it would take a real sourpuss to deny how beautiful the results can be.

Christina Ricci prancing around in New York designer Karan’s finest glitzy black dress, leggings and wedge boots is a long, long way from Wednesday.

© 2009 – 2018, Lord Christopher Laverty.