Longing for Visual Attraction: Fashion and Fabrics as Sensual Quality in the Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch

This chapter examines the role of fashion, fabric, and surface aesthetics in Lubitsch’s early silent films, particularly Sumurun (1920). Drawing from German media archaeology, fashion theory, and the aesthetics of ornament, it argues that Lubitsch constructs a uniquely haptic cinematic language through the sensuous materiality of costume and décor. Fabrics and textures in Sumurun and related films become expressive agents of character, class, and desire, contributing to a poetics of surface that challenges dominant narratives of cinematic depth or interiority. The chapter situates Lubitsch’s work within broader trends in early twentieth-century visual culture and design, highlighting how film and fashion intersect as shared sites of modernist experimentation and embodied spectatorship.