After the ubiquitous archival exhibition and the building designed by a famous architect and destined to contain the personal art collection of a fashion magnate, there is another plague slowly yet relentlessly invading our quiet lives - the vague fashion documentary.
Believe it or not, convincing an avant-garde independent cinema to do one monthly screening of a fashion documentary was almost impossible seven years ago. The answer was usually the same - it was something destined to a niche audience, quite often a superficial niche audience. At least that's what I was told when I tried to organise some screenings at a Glasgow-based cinema many years ago. Bizarre, but, throughout April, that same cinema screened at least once a day Frédéric Tcheng's Dior & I (2014).
Surprising? No at all, especially when you think it's not just a matter of trends, but of pumping up things online and on the social networks, convincing people that fashion documentaries can be interesting even when you're not a fashionista. Mind you, in a way, they actually are. Dior & I revealed us for example that a conceptual designer doesn't actually draw, but compiles files for his team and the team then submits their sketches to him, and that he quite often reproduces entire modern paintings onto fabrics.
But the next stage of the "vague fashion documentary", which means a film that doesn't reveal anything new about the designer in question. Enter The Artist is Absent.
Directed by Alison Chernick's and commissioned by fashion e-tailer Yoox Group, The Artist Is Absent focuses on Martin Margiela. Premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival in April and released also on line, this short documentary (it's roughly 12 minutes long) features a series of brief interviews with journalists and designers, plus archival footage.
As the title (a pun on Marina Abramović's Museum of Modern Art 2010 show The Artist is Present) announces, the artist doesn't actually appear in the documentary, nor does the new Creative Director of the house, John Galliano, or its current owners (Renzo Rosso's Only the Brave).
The director moves from Margiela's early years at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and briefly tells his story through interviews with journalists, curators and designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier (Margiela apprenticed under him from 1985 to 1987) and Raf Simons.
One interesting point is the fact that the film suggests us the designer may have picked his passion for deconstruction from his mother's obsession for buying vintage furniture and taking it apart, though it is in a way a guess as we don't hear it directly from Margiela.
Margiela is indeed absent. In the words of fashion critic and International Vogue Editor Suzy Menkes he is "the Greta Garbo of fashion" as he has always avoided the spotlight, eluding interviews and photographs, preferring to let his clothes speak for themselves, that's why his models' faces were usually covered during catwalk shows.
What is surprising about the documentary, though, is that it doesn't comment at all about our self-centered narcissistic age in which the cult of celebrity prevails over talent, and superstar designers and celebrity models rule supreme, nor does it note how the no glamour, no image, no ego designer who subverted the rules of the fashion media-circus is now being namechecked as an alleged inspiration by the same people who represent that circus (think about Kanye West and his pathetic "designs").
The lack of criticism comes from the fact that, despite its noble intent, the documentary was commissioned by Yoox and therefore it is destined to drive more e-sales (apparently, every time they launched a new short film, visits increased by 20%).
Simons actually attempts some criticism when he states (the most intelligent thing of the entire documentary): "Martin said what he needed to say, and I personally think that it's ultimately admirable when a person knows that he or she said what they had to say, and - basta. It’s what more people should do."
Still it remains disappointing not to hear more from Margiela himself and we are left with the doubt: did they have the time and money to actually speak to him, but never bothered to do so, or Margiela is definitely not interested in telling us more about his practice and the state of the current fashion industry?
So Margiela remains a mystery, an enigma that can't be decoded, and while you respect it since, as Poirot states in the film Murder on the Orient Express - "Some of us, in the words of the divine Greta Garbo, 'want to be alone' " - you are left with a sort of uncovincingly vague fashion doc.
There is something that should make us happy about The Artist is Absent, though: at least it's a free documentary, which is a change considering that the Dior & I production house does not even bother replying when you request of being allowed to show for educational purposes short clips of the documentary for free to groups of university students.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments