To celebrate the current spate of fashion feature films –  among them: Coco before Chanel, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, The September Issue, Valentino: The Last Emperor, Lagerfeld Confidential and, ahem, Brüno – this month brings you clips (short film/ads/music videos as appropriate) with a strong sense of fashion.

Lynnfox's video for Bjork's 'Oceania' track

The White Stripes

Bringing together Jack White and Karen Elson who he would later marry, Blue Orchid is a fabulous gothic treasure crafted to perfection. Always with a toe dipped into the fashion world, The White Stripes recruited Kate Moss for this video (I don’t know what to do with Myself) which apparently Pete Doherty admitted to watching on repeat before he and Moss actually got it together.

Oceania – Bjork

Probably one of the most visually dazzling videos I may ever have seen, Bjork’s Oceania video was directed by a team who go under the name Lynnfox.

Whatever you think of Bjork and of her music, you can’t deny that this woman never fails to entertain us visually. Also see: All is full of Love and Cocoon.

Chanel / Dior

With not one but two Chanel feature films doing the rounds, and with the word on the street being that neither is that impressive, it’s a good job we can remind ourselves that Chanel on screen has brought us many wonderful adverts over the years. Love it or hate it, Baz Luhrmann’s short film was a serious event.

Meanwhile, long before Johnny Depp, and just 4 years after Joe le Taxi, Vanessa Paradis modeled for Chanel in this sexy piece.

Of late Chanel has recruited the actresses du jour – Audrey Tautou and Keira Knightley – for some rather predictable visuals, leaving room for Dior to get in on the act and deliver this gem with Marion Cotillard.

Linda Evangelista in George Michael's 'Freedom' video

George Michael

No mention of fashion on film can fail to mention the model-fests of George Michael’s 1990s videos. Too Funky was overflowing with supermodels in a piece where you couldn’t quite discern if it was homage or pastiche, or perhaps both.

Also worth checking out are Freedom, Spinning the Wheel and Fastlove.

Meanwhile George’s fascination with models is still is full swing today, as proved by these fabulous concert visuals starring Dita von Teese which were created for his recent tour.

Brands have been blurring the line between advertisements and short films of late, often recruiting high profile fiction directors to direct models/stars in highly stylized narrative adverts. This falls into a bit of a grey area that people are calling Branded Content – most advertising agencies and/or production companies have developed their own departments to deal exclusively with this rising area. Check out some brands who’ve hit the nail on the head below.

Levi’s

Levi’s have been at the cutting-edge of advert-making since way back when. This one directed by Michael Gondry has to be one of their finest moments though.

Other gems from the Levi’s vault include:

• Mermaids: another Gondry piece from 1997 featuring Paul Schulfor before he’d dated anyone famous (yet he doesn’t seem to have aged a day).
• I think no-one has ever forgotten ‘The Swimmer’, and that song will be forever associated with it.
• This one – from 1985 believe it or not – without doubt launched a whole new wave of laundry-going:

Kylie Minogue's advert for Agent Provocateur

Agent Provocateur

Looking back on this advert, it’s incredible to think quite how they managed to pull this off. Kylie Minogue…gyrating…in her underwear…on a bucking bronco. I don’t think anyone saw this coming.

Agent Provocateur have delivered a pretty consistently strong visual marketing campaign over the years, which resulted in the interesting collaboration of Mike Figgis directing Kate Moss in a series known as The Dreams of Miss X. Moss was eventually replaced (she allegedly abandoned ship after disapproving of co-founder Serena Rees’ behaviour during her divorce from other co-founder Joe Corre) and since then a string of high profile models have modeled for AP, including Daisy Lowe, Helena Christensen and Rosie Huntingdon-Whiteley. The latter starred in this fairly saucy piece.

A few other treasures for your pleasure:

David Lachapelle's advert for Boots

H&M/Cavalli: Satisfying all stereotypes and clichés about what fashion parties are like, this ad for Cavalli’s range at H&M is a visual gem.

Adidas: It’s not fashion per se, but this Adidas ad definitely has style, and that song is pure class.

New Yorker comes up trumps with this clip which can’t help but remind me of Death Becomes Her.

Even David Lynch hasn’t been able to resist the lure of advert sized-paychecks and throughout the 80s and 90s brought his own special brand of direction to a series of perfume ads: Obsession (this is the first of four ads in this series, this one inspired by the work of F Scott Fitzgerald and featuring a Benicio del Toro from 1990! , Opium and Gucci.

The full playlist of all these films can be accessed on the Running in Heels YouTube Channel here