Ten great films about fashion
The fashion industry takes a beating this month, with Nicolas Winding Refn’s brutal fashion world-set horror The Neon Demon and fashion PR satire Absolutely Fabulous coming to a big screen near you. It’s the perfect time, then, to look back at cinema’s great fashion movies
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
Dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
This berserk study in manipulation and desire from the fiery genius of New German Cinema is confined to a single hot-house location, the garish boudoir of the titular fashion designer – it never feels stagy, though. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus utilises the space with style, finding inventive compositions with each new shot.
The cast is limited to three main players – Von Kant (played by Margit Carstensen) is joined by her assistant (Irm Hermann) and a wannabe model (Hanna Schygulla), with whom the designer becomes infatuated – and Fassbinder's placement of the trio within the frame reveals as much about the shifting power dynamics as the ferocious and funny dialogue.
The Skinny presents The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at HOME, Manchester on 6 Jul as part of a season in celebration of Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon – book your ticket here
Bill Cunningham New York
Dir. Richard Press
New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who recently passed away aged 87, had, for five decades, documented street fashion in New York City. He was uninterested in celebrity or labels: the price of the garments you wore didn’t matter to him or his camera, it was how well you wore them.
Richard Press’s fleet-footed documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, paints the octogenarian as a kind of fashionista superhero, where his arch-nemesis is bland cookie cutter apparel. The film’s best moments show Cunningham at work snapping his prey, who range from haute couture-clad It girls to peacocking drag queens.
As sprightly a subject as Cunningham is, there’s a melancholy to the film too. We get the sense that the photographer had little time for any other passions beyond his work. The price of his lifelong quest to document beauty was clearly a heavy one.
Read our review of Bill Cunningham New York
Blood and Black Lace
Dir. Mario Bava
Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace is the quintessential giallo film and the proto-slasher that would go on to influence the direction of Italian and American horror for the next two decades. The film centres around a fashion house where a masked killer in a trench coat is picking off models one by one in increasingly vicious ways. Appropriately for a horror-whodunit set within the fashion world, Blood and Black Lace looks stunning, with Bava finding a macabre beauty within this haute couture cesspit of greed, blackmail and murder.
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Brüno
Dir. Larry Charles
Brüno is a gay, German-speaking, fashion-obsessed host of an Austrian television show who desperately wants to make it big in the US. His attempts to court celebrity are myriad, from helping broach peace between Israel and Palestine to adopting a black baby, who he gives that “traditional African name”, OJ.
While Brüno lacks the surprise of Borat, and the character of Brüno, a grasping wannabe, is a lot less easy to love than the naive Kazakhstani news reporter, it’s just about as funny. If the politicised Mexican chair people gag doesn’t get you, then the sight of Brüno giving head to the ghost of Milli from Milli Vanilli certainly will.
And appropriately for this list, some of the best gags are fashion related. “What type of belt is that, candidate,” says an exasperated officer putting Bruno through military training. “D and G,” says Bruno. “What the hell is D and G?” “Dolce and Gabbana, hello.”
Blowup
Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
“If you can remember anything about the 60s,” the old adage goes, “then you weren't really there.” No need to remember, as Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni made this wonderful time capsule capturing the heights of the swinging antics in London during that decade.
Blowup stars a mop-topped David Hemmings as a David Bailey-like fashion photographer who, after blowing up his photos of a couple frolicking in a park, thinks he’s inadvertently witnessed a murder. As with all Antonioni films, Blowup is not without its pretentiousness, but his blend of erotic thriller with the day-in-the-life observations of a playboy photographer is pretty irresistible.
The Eye of Laura Mars
Dir. Irvin Kershner
Irvin Kershner's thriller The Eye of Laura Mars is that rare example of an American giallo, with its head-scratching twist and stunning use of point-of-view. The Laura of the title is a photographer who specialises in outrageously sadistic fashion shoots. But she has to question the sexual violence in her work when a series of real life murders begin to look a lot like her art.
Things get even worse when she seems to become telepathically linked to the killer, seeing the murders happen through his eyes, and eventually she begins to see the killer stalking her. Written by a young John Carpenter, the film’s as pulpy as it is sharp. Irvin Kershner’s elegant and witty direction, meanwhile, caught the eye of George Lucas, who asked him to direct The Empire Strikes Back.
Funny Face
Dir. Stanley Donen
This vibrant musical from Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen stars Audrey Hepburn as an introverted bookworm who gets whisked off to the City of Lights to become a supermodel when a charismatic photographer, played by Fred Astaire, spots her working in a bookshop and falls for her “funny face.” Donen’s film has style to burn and some wonderful song and dance numbers. Let’s ignore the thin plot and the portrayal of Paris as a city of turtleneck-wearing creeps.
Zoolander
Dir. Ben Stiller
OK, the sequel from earlier this year was a crushing disappointment, with director-star Ben Stiller relying on celebrity cameos to keep the film afloat. By contrast, the original, from 2001, looks like a dada masterpiece.
Stiller’s film takes the form of a series of non sequitur comedy sketches strung together by a sub-Manchurian Candidate plot. Will Ferrell plays an evil fashionista with a sideline in assassination, and he brainwashes the models who flaunt his collection to do his bidding. While suggesting that models aren’t too bright isn’t the greatest form of satire in the world, Stiller's approach is so goofily sweet-natured that it never feels cruel.
Zoolander even has moments of bizarre pathos, from the model’s crippling inability to turn left (an affliction that lets him down badly during a "walk-off" hosted by David Bowie) to the film’s funniest setpiece, where the preening model quits the industry and joins his father and brothers working in a coal mine.
Double bill: The Devil Wears Prada / The September Issue
Dir. David Frankel / Dir. RJ Cutler
The Devil Wears Prada casts Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, a tyrannical fashion magazine editor who demands perfection from her quivering staff, whom she toys with using increasingly insatiable demands: “Find me that piece of paper I had in my hand yesterday morning,” she says to her newly-appointed assistant, winningly played by Anne Hathaway.
Streep’s character was reportedly inspired by Vogue’s fierce editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, famed for her icy stares from behind her ever-present sunglasses. You’d be hard pressed not to spot the similarities watching that 2006 comedy back-to-back with R.J. Cutler’s mischievous 2009 documentary The September Issue, which follows Wintour and her team as they prepare for the magazine’s key edition of the year.
Unlike some of the titles on this list, these films aren’t just set within the fashion world, they’re about the fashion world itself. Their characters treat it as an artform, as important as life or death; both editors’ withering putdowns only come when those around them don’t show reverence for the work. What makes both films so crisply entertaining is that they manage to acknowledge that fashion is a serious business without taking it too seriously.
• Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is relased 1 Jul by 20th Century Fox
• The Neon Demon is released 8 Jul by Icon – read our interview with Nicolas Winding Refn
• The Skinny presents The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant at HOME, Manchester on 6 Jul as part of a season in celebration of Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon – book your ticket here