Consciousness, Capitalism and Costume in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2023)

Ripley, Julie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4963-9977 (2024) Consciousness, Capitalism and Costume in Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2023). Film, Fashion & Consumption, 13 (1). pp. 101-115. ISSN 2044-2831 (In Press)

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Abstract / Summary

In Ruben Östland’s Triangle of Sadness (2023), two fashion models spend much
of a luxury cruise documenting their experience on social media until a catastrophic
storm and an attack by pirates reduces marauders, crew and the urban
sophisticates aboard to savagery. This article makes use of concepts and methodologies
applied to film by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to explore how
Triangle’s costumes, by Sophie Krunegård, can be read as expressing the relationship
between beauty, fashion and ideology. Applying Žižek’s tripartite structure of
Freudian superego, ego and id to the film’s three sections, his notions of the Real,
the Symptom and the Master Signifier are explored to further reveal how costume
offers glimpses of the characters’ repressed and fetishistic attitudes to money, material
goods and status.

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