The Social Aspects and Costumes of the 1980's Expressed in the Movie 'American Psycho'

A movie's fashion style delivers the overall atmosphere of the scene including the characters's class, personality, spiritual world and inner thinking and even their conflicts in the story. The movie 'American Psycho' directed by Mary Harron and based on from Bret Easton Ellis's original novel ridicules the American yuppie culture of the 1980's through the behavior of the hero Patrick Bateman. The life style of the yuppie sees itself as the high-class embodiment of a particular culture, but the various subcultures such as Glam and Punk show that it is merely a two-faced culture suffering from hypocrisy and mammonism. An analysis of the costumes found in the movie indicated an exhibition of the 1980's Haute Couture fashion, which was mainly occupied by the mainstream social class and of the social phenomenon of post-modernism. The anti-fashion presented in the movie as the resistance culture formed by the subculture was in extreme contrast with the expression of self-actualization.