New York Fashion Week is kicking off in a couple of days, officially opening the fashion circus for the Spring/Summer 2011 season.
Once again the fashion media will spot "the next big thing"; once again pretty ordinary collections will be hailed as extraordinarily examples of modern beauty and, yes, once again we will seen more fake smiles, rivalry, envy and tensions between bloggers and journalists.
The only difference between this season and the previous ones is probably that more fashion houses and brands are now opting for live streams to allow people from all over the world to watch their catwalk shows.
The more I think about the fashion week circus set to start, the more William Klein’s Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (1966) comes to my mind.
This satire of the fashion industry that tries to discover who is 20-year-old Polly Maggoo, an American girl working in Paris as model, opens indeed with a catwalk show that became rather famous among fashion and cinema fans.
As the film opens Klein's camera follows the last minute preparations of a catwalk show by designer Isidore Ducasse, who is going to present a series of aluminium dresses that are supposed to form the wardrobe for the nuclear age woman. The designs are used by the director as a parody of 60s metal fashion creations à la Paco Rabanne.
When helpers and models announce Ducasse that Miss Maxwell - editor in chief of a famous fashion magazine, opinion maker and, as somebody whispers when she steps in, “a bitch” - has arrived, the designer thinks “That idiot won’t get it this time either”, and keeps on putting the final touches to his creations.
Yet, Ducasse’s unwearable and bizarre outfits pass for the works of a genius, as Miss Maxwell stands up at the end of the show claiming “He’s recreated woman!" and goes to congratulate the designer, telling him “You’re an architect, a sculptor!”, while another woman pontificates, “Botticelli’s monumental angels...the archangel of robots...tempests transfixed and deified...You don’t just create, you galvanise!”
Happy they have finally understood what he is up to, Ducasse announces, "I have great plans: I’ll be doing the same collection in copper!" Interviewed by TV director Grégoire, Ducasse explains he opted for aluminium because modern clothes must have more structure, ridiculously stating in a serious tone, “We must restructure the structures and reposition woman within the cosmogonic universe we have inhabited for years now.”
Later on in the film, Miss Maxwell dictates on the phone a review of Ducasse’s catwalk show, proclaiming "Fashion is dead! Long Live fashion!" eventually dubbing the designer “choreographer of the female body", stating "he recreated woman, born of his rib and electronic brain, she emerged fully clothed, our Eve for the atomic age. A wardrobe fit for Joan of Arc…Peter Pan collars in metal sheet…”
Rarely did a film about fashion
grasp so well the superficiality of catwalk shows, the grand yet vapid words used by fashion critics to pontificate over a specific collection and the behaviour of some critics.
The film – featuring costumes by Janine Klein, aluminium dresses by Bernard and François Baschet and Xavier de la Salle, dresses by Grès, Dorothée Bis, Mohanjeet Grewal, menswear by Ted Lapidus and department store La Belle Jardinière (for the Prince's attires) and hairstyles and wigs by the Carita sisters – also features a photo shoot in a graveyard linking fashion and death, that the magazine editor uses to wonder if Paris is dead fashion-wise.
There are bits and pieces in the film that are extremely funny like the part in which Grégoire interviews a sociologist who tells an alternative version of the Cinderella fable: “The prince arrives, the older sister takes the slipper to try it on. Her mother goes with her. The slipper’s too small. The mother says to cut off her big toe. ‘Once you’re queen you’ll never need to walk.’ The girl cuts off her toes, puts on the slipper and rejoins the prince. He carries her away on his horse. But the prince discovers the hoax, when the bride’s white stockings are stained with red, etc. There you have it: fetishism. Fetishism, mutilation, suffering – fashion in a nutshell.”
I'm embedding the opening scenes of Klein's Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? at the end of this post, but, before that, here's my favourite dialogue between Polly (Dorothy McGowan) and Grégoire Pecque (Jean Rochefort).
So, is fashion about "money and illusion", something that is used "to sell and dupe people” as one of the editors of Grégoire’s TV news documentary series says? You decide (but I guess Miss Maxwell would just answer this question with her exclamation "Fashion is dead! Long Live fashion!"). Enjoy the S/S 2011 fashion weeks.
Polly: What about fashion?
Grégoire: It doesn’t really exist.
Polly: Yes, it does.
Grégoire: How so?
Polly: Because it’s always changing. Everything passes away. Fashion endures because it changes. What doesn’t change dies.
Polly: It’s not stupid, it’s fun and it makes lots of sense. Everything has its fashions: love, ideas, even war and politics.
Grégoire: One thing at a time. Fashion is about money and deception.
Polly: So is war.
Grégoire: We’re talking about you now. There’s something you don’t realise: you’re being used. Like all women. They use you to dupe other women, driving you all crazy in the process.
Polly: What’s crazy about me?
Grégoire: What’s not crazy about you! It’s stupid putting on makeup, dressing up, staring in the mirror.
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