The Power of Film

Consumer brands have long understood the immense influence of popular culture in shaping trends and reaching consumers. Film, in particular, serves as a showcase for emergent design in fashion, technology, music, and art.

The Bond franchise is the obvious example: Tom Ford suits, Omega watches, HP gadgets. But film’s power extends beyond product placement. It conveys the soft power of brands by embedding their aesthetics into culture without resorting to the hard sell.

Consider Giorgio Armani in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), Yves Saint Laurent in Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983), or Jean Paul Gaultier in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989). These films did not rely on advertising tie-ins, yet they helped define the visual language of their eras. They succeeded because film functions as a design ecosystem — a medium where fashion, architecture, music, and art converge and cross-pollinate.

Film doesn’t just display design trends; it incubates them. The Hunger may have featured Saint Laurent costumes, but it also propelled the band Bauhaus to prominence and ignited a Bauhaus design revival in the 1980s. At its most effective, film synthesises multiple creative disciplines into a seamless whole — as exemplified by Tom Ford’s films, where fashion, architecture, and art coalesce with cinematic precision.

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

Here, the opportunity remains largely untapped. Developers rarely engage with film or popular culture as a way to shape desire. This is partly because property is too often framed as construction rather than consumer product. It is also because architecture, protected by its own professional gatekeeping, approaches film only when architecture itself plays the protagonist. The result is an insular, parochial view of cinema — one that ignores its potential to transform property from a financial asset into a fully-fledged cultural object.

If Tom Ford can merge fashion, architecture, and film into a seamless cultural statement, why can’t developers do the same with property — the most expensive and immersive consumer product of all?