This sporting life

With the Rugby League World Cup having got underway in Australia at the weekend, the site of this fast-paced game, with sweaty athletic bodies running around a pitch, reminded us at Bookshelf Boyfriend Towers to watch a film that none of us had seen for years. 

This Sporting Life, directed by Lindsey Anderson in 1963, centres around Frank Machin (played by Richard Harris), a Rugby League player from Wakefield in Yorkshire.

If you’ve never understood the allure of Rugby League, or its importance to industrial working towns in northern England, then this film will enlighten you and demonstrate how utterly compelling it can be.  Not only that, This Sporting Life is one of the greatest British films ever made.  A “kitchen sink drama” figure-heading the new wave of social realist filmmaking in the 1960s Britain, it is beautifully shot and beguilingly acted – winning Richard Harris the best actor award in Cannes. 

Not necessarily the happiest film you’ll ever see,  but if you only need one reason to watch it, we are all agreed here that Richard Harris looks Hot!

 

This Sporting Life is available to buy at Amazon:

This Sporting Life (DVD) [1963]

If you want to find out more about the Rugby League World Cup, the official site is:

http://www.rlwc08.com/

If you want to know what on earth Rugby League is, why its so great, and get to grip with the rules, then read our Girls guide to Rugby League at Bookshelf Boyfriend.com.

 

Fashion vs Sport at the V&A

Through its constant re-invention, the world of fashion has taken influence from a massive range of concepts over the years.

As showcased at the Fashion vs Sport exhibition at the V&A, even the world of sport has come to influence the way we dress. Technologies of sportswear have been integrated into dressmaking in the last few decades, producing higher performance, yet stylistically aware garments.

The polo shirt was the first sportswear item to be worn casually in the 1920s, and since then designers such as Stella McCartney, Vivienne Westwood, Prada and Nike have taken into consideration form and function, as well as fashion by producing casual, street styles.

Sportswear giants such as Nike have produced collections which explore the connections between sports engineering and street credibility. The customisation of sportswear which is seen on the street is filtering ever more into designer collections, where labels are combining sportswear with everyday apparel.

 

Designers have always been aware of the way that clothes are used as a different language to express personality and taste. Puma’s range of trainers by Mihara Sutiro convey a playful nature and are used as satirical, almost political statements, whilst Walter van Beirendonck produced an outfit which made an attack on McDonalds and the world of capitalism.

However, through advertising and consumption, the sports items produced by fashion brands now bear little relation to their original function. The combination of sport and fashion has inevitably meant that the status symbol, and therefore the fashion have taken presidency over the sport. Whilst at the exhibition, you only have to glance at Chanel’s surfboard of 2003, or Paul Smiths bike of 2006, or most recently Chanel’s fishing rods of 2008 to see that fashion is now the key feature.

 

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/fashion-v-sport/

on until 4^th Jan 2009  

 

[Hannah Eichler]