Kate Hudson in ‘Nine’

Thanks to such screen moments as Meryl Streep’s “cerulean blue” speech in The Devil Wears Prada, as well as the behind-the-scenes-at-US-Vogue documentary, The September Issue, some of the mysteries of fashion have been decoded.

Designers, stylists and photographers either consciously seek, or simply absorb, inspiration from all sorts of cultural stimuli, filter it through their creative consciousness and then, some months down the track, we suddenly find ourselves feeling that we really need to look a little Memoirs of a Geisha this season or perhaps a bit more DreamGirls.

In other words, if you think the sudden appearance of capes everywhere from Chloe to Celine is a fluke, or you wonder why sparkles for the festive season somehow look more desirable than they did this time last year, it could be that two of the upcoming big movie releases have been on creative people’s minds.

Is it possible those capes can be traced back to the buzz that has been gathering for months about the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. film Sherlock Holmes? As for that feeling that the time is right to shimmy in crystal, look no further than Rob Marshall’s all-singing, all-dancing Nine, due to open next month and featuring work from Swarovski and Chopard.

Indeed, Marshall’s all-star cast – Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson and Marion Cotillard – is already on the cover of the latest US Vogue. The movie is the long anticipated cinematic adaptation of the Broadway show based on Fellini’s 8 1/2, currently in many a designer’s DVD library as the reference point for 1960s chic, and the costume designer is Colleen Atwood, the double Oscar winner for Chicago (2002) and the aforementioned Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) – both films that also had a notable impact on consumer fashion.

Autumn/winter 2009 designs by Derek Lam, Balmain and Versace

Big costume movies are obvious candidates for sartorial influence for a couple of reasons: they are full of clothes that the viewer is meant to notice and they are showy productions with enormous promotional budgets. Yet, fashion designers also tend to be inspired more tangentially, and more idiosyncratic movies can have a profound, if subtle, effect on what we wear.

This season, for example, Jane Campion’s Bright Star, which explores how the finest lines penned by the poet Keats were sparked by Fanny Brawne, a girl his friends warned was a style minx, is already creating interest in fashion circles.

While no one would suggest there will suddenly be a revival of the teenage Brawne’s creations, the larger influence is likely to be seen in fashion’s colour palette shifting from recessionary to ravishing.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that the costume designer and Campion’s longtime collaborator, Janet Patterson, has caused style shifts before. After The Piano won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1993, scores of fashion shoots took inspiration from a mute mother and her little daughter camping out under a crinoline on a stormy beach, including some gorgeously moody pictures by Michael Woolley that appeared in The Independent on Sunday (shot on a shoestring entirely within the M25), and a series for US Vogue styled by Grace Coddington on an African beach and photographed by Ellen von Unwerth. Suddenly, John Galliano showed a bevy of featherlight ballgowns suspended over crinoline petticoats, which in turn heralded the return of big evening gowns after years of slender silhouettes.

Patterson says she’d love it if her latest work proves equally influential. “I’m excited that those celebrity designer-types might be inspired. Everything feeds everything else.” Though her work considers historical accuracy, it is not bound to it – a reason, perhaps, that it translates so well into a contemporary context.

“A [period drama] has to be interpretative, authentic to feelings,” says Patterson, “so Jane [Campion] and I talked about Keats as a young man now, Fanny as a young woman now, who they might be like.” Patterson lives near Sydney’s equivalent of London’s Central St. Martins, and cites “the pleasure of seeing students every day – their originality, their self expression,” as being every bit as important as a seeing the original Fanny’s sketchbooks.

“I could argue in defence of the [clothes in Bright Star] being absolutely accurate,” she says, “but I’m much more interested in the characters and the whole tone and psychology than being caught up in one button or two.”

“I hate it when things stand out, I regard it as a failure, a dead spot, when you start drifting around and noticing the clothes.” What she hopes is that we will absorb the atmosphere, a mood painted in tones of dove grey and the myriad pinks of apple blossom and roses.

But while the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney may adore Bright Star for the sugar pinks already in their repertoire, the movie’s real influence will be charted when designers who rarely use the shade start to do so.

And chances are they will, to the point that if The Devil Wears Prada were filming at the end of next year, odds are those savvy scriptwriters would scratch out cerulean blue and replace it with cyclamen pink.