Kubrickian couture: The catwalk owes a lot to the late director

Stanley Kubrick had an exacting eye, for which costume was understandably key, say Alexander Fury

You don't think fashion when you think of Stanley Kubrick. You think of The Overlook Hotel's near-endless corridors, Alex and his marauding droogs in A Clockwork Orange, or the waltzing retro-futuristic technologies of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike the dapper jodhpured likes of Cecil B DeMille, the director's director was no fashion plate, habitually bearded in down-at-heel clothing.

Nevertheless, Kubrick had an exacting eye, for which costume was understandably key. Several were presented earlier this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in an exhibition titled, simply, Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A Space Odyssey called for precision: British royal couturier Hardy Amies was drafted in to create them. Marisa Berenson was banned from sunbathing for months before Barry Lyndon began filming, and Kubrick himself was said to have suggested Malcolm McDowell sport his jockstrap over his trousers for the instantly recognisable costumes of A Clockwork Orange.

That instant recognition is important. Even if Kubrick himself wasn't fashionable, and his films were costume rather than fashion per se, they have become intrinsic parts of the fashion landscape. Think Lolita, and it's the heart-shaped sunglasses of Kubrick's incarnation that leap to mind.

It's not just pop-culture sartorial referencing. The influence of Kubrick's oeuvre on contemporary catwalks seems endless. A favourite are the malevolent ghosts of the Grady twins from The Shining: last October, almost-identical models descended two-by-two on vast escalators at Louis Vuitton, while in 1999, Alexander McQueen offered a doppelgänger duo marching hand-in-hand down an ice catwalk. He called that show The Overlook.

Of course, the cinematic bent of McQueen's imagination, combined with his love of the macabre, made him and Kubrick ideal bedfellows. But such is the aesthetic richness of Kubrick's celluloid world, many other designers have been pulled in. The director has even spawned an adjective – Kubrickian – used liberally by fashion journalists. It has described everything from the vast, geometric carpet that smothered the catwalks of Miuccia Prada's autumn/winter 2012 men's and womenswear shows, to the peculiarly Sixties pairing of saturated tomato-orange with acres of disco-futuristic white.

There are two arguments for its prevalence. Fashion designers often alight on the same influences. If they're thinking Sixties, they're usually cribbing from A Space Odyssey and Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?. That's the cynical view. It also doesn't give Kubrick credit for the strength of his vision. His is the kind of eye bound to influence future generations. Steven Spielberg put it best: "In the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like Kubrick's vision... It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy". Fashion included.