Nick Rees-Roberts
Nick Rees-Roberts is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris, France (email contact: nick.rees-roberts@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr). He is the director of the Masters programme in Fashion and Creative Industries in the Faculty of Arts and Media.
He holds a BA(Hons)/MA (Oxon) in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex (UK). He was formerly Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol (UK) from 2007 to 2016.
Professor Rees-Roberts’ research focuses on contemporary media-culture in the intersecting fields of fashion studies, film studies, and gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of French Queer Cinema (2008/2014), Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (2018), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (2010), and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015) and Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship (2021).He is currently writing a book on failure in fashion (Bloomsbury, 2025) and co-editing The Elizabeth Wilson Reader: Feminism, Fashion and the Aesthetics of Modern Life (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Address: Nick Rees-Roberts
Professeur des Universités,
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
UFR Arts & Médias,
8 avenue de Saint Mandé,
75012 Paris,
France.
Email: nick.rees-roberts@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
He holds a BA(Hons)/MA (Oxon) in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex (UK). He was formerly Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol (UK) from 2007 to 2016.
Professor Rees-Roberts’ research focuses on contemporary media-culture in the intersecting fields of fashion studies, film studies, and gender and sexuality studies. He is the author of French Queer Cinema (2008/2014), Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (2018), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (2010), and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (2015) and Isabelle Huppert: Stardom, Performance, Authorship (2021).He is currently writing a book on failure in fashion (Bloomsbury, 2025) and co-editing The Elizabeth Wilson Reader: Feminism, Fashion and the Aesthetics of Modern Life (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Address: Nick Rees-Roberts
Professeur des Universités,
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
UFR Arts & Médias,
8 avenue de Saint Mandé,
75012 Paris,
France.
Email: nick.rees-roberts@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
less
InterestsView All (19)
Uploads
Books by Nick Rees-Roberts
Papers by Nick Rees-Roberts
digital content and branded entertainment as they do design and
product. Online video is a key part of that production. In this article, the
author questions whether the use of the generic term ‘fashion film’ is still
relevant to discussions of the moving image in the digital age. He does
this by examining a range of promotional uses of the moving image by the
fashion industry – by brands such as Gucci, Burberry and Louis Vuitton
– on the social media platforms Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, which
blend design with media. This article seeks to engage critically with the
branded dominance of ‘fashion film’ as a commercial phenomenon in
contemporary visual culture by positioning it as a shape-shifting form of
‘content’ through the dissemination of moving images on social media,
on mobile image-sharing platforms, in which the visual dynamic of the
feed (of marketing and data) is now, in part, superseding the aesthetic
framework of cinema (of narrative and drama). Rather than situating it
primarily as part of film history, here the author situates the contemporary
fashion-moving image at the intersection of digital interactivity, fashion
branding and celebrity influence.
Keywords. brand content • fashion • film • influence • mobile platforms •
moving image • social media
In this chapter, I explore this nexus of queer relationality, sexuality and age through the offbeat fictional worlds imagined by contemporary French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie. I have previously drawn on Foucault’s original definition of same-sex friendship models as bound up in pleasure through the example of cross-generational intimacy to interpret Guiraudie’s films Real Cool Time (2000), The King of Escape (2009) and Stranger By The Lake (2013). Here, I argue that his subsequent film, Staying Vertical (2016), described by the director as his ‘most queer film’ to date, echoes an earlier literary exploration of cross-generational intimacy—the director’s début novel The Night Begins Here (2014), a darkly erotic tale that recounts the desire for a nonagenarian man. Staying Vertical in part transposes this narrative focus on gerontophilia to the screen. Unlike Stranger By The Lake, a more formally conventional thriller about gay male cruising, Staying Vertical is queerer in its oblique way of troubling categories of both erotic identification and lived sexual identity: the protagonist, Léo, a creatively blocked filmmaker, lusts after boys while fathering a child with a woman whom he randomly meets. However, the real challenge posed by the film is in relation to the social conventions of ‘age-appropriate’ physicality and sexual desirability. The most provocative sequence involves an act of euthanasia through sex between a very old and a very young man. Thinking vertically, therefore, involves the rejection of the more mainstream LGBT identity politics of sameness for what Guiraudie posits as a hallucinatory utopian vision of unfettered eroticism across the generations. Staying Vertical playfully suggests that smashing taboos of age and ageing and norms of physical attractiveness and desirability provides the key to unlocking the more experimental forms of queer relationality, which seek to dispense with the fictions of sexual identity.