Category: Fashion

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris

Rated: PGMrs. Harris goes to Paris

Directed by: Anthony Fabian

Based on the Novel by: Paul Gallico

Screenplay by: Carroll Cartwright, Anthony Fabian, Keith Thompson, Olivia Hetreed

Produced by: Xavier Marchand, Guillaume Benski, Anthony Fabian

Starring: Lesley Manville, Isabelle Huppert, Jason Isaacs, Anna Chancellor, Lambert Wilson, Alba Baptista, Lucas Bravo, Rose Williams.

To make the invisible, visible.

It’s 1957 London – it’s foggy.  Mrs. Harris (Lesley Manville) holds a package.

‘What’s it to be Eddy?’  She asks of the package, of her husband who’s been missing since 1944.  ‘Good news?  Or bad news?’

It doesn’t matter what a flip of a coin will determine.  Mrs. Harris will always want to believe in the good.

One of her clients she cleans for, a want-to-be actress named Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams) tells her,’ You’re an angel.  What would I do without you?’

Mrs. Harris wants for nothing; and puts up with a lot.  She spends her time with best friend, Vi (Ellen Thomas), whom she met while building planes during the war.

Then while cleaning for Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor), Mrs. Harris sees it.  The dress.  The camera focusses on her face of wonder, the world around her a blur as she takes the lilac dress, handling the beading, her face glowing.  It’s a Christian Dior, Lady Dant explains.  ‘When I put it on, nothing else matters.’

Mrs. Harris dreams.

Then when life seems like it’s never going to get any better, she wins the Pools.  That’s when she decides she does want something: she wants a Christian Dior dress, from Paris, for 500 quid.

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris is superficially a lighthearted tale, showing the very best of human nature, while also exploring Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism in, Being and Nothingness (1943).

The theme of perception and nothingness is introduced when Mrs. Harris meets French model, Natasha (Alba Baptista) who’s found to be reading Sartre, who also wants to be seen, not in a wonderful Christian Dress, but as someone more than a pretty face.  It’s that invisible being made visible thread that drives the film so yes, it’s about a woman wanting a beautiful dress but more than that, she deserves to be seen.

And the Parisians take Mrs. Harris and her down-to-earth humour and niceness and honesty into their hearts.

Because she’s a wonder, with cash to spend on a Haute Couture dress.

They love her for it.

She’s reminded, ‘Remember in France, the Worker is King.’

All except the manageress of the House of Christian Dior, Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) who resists the indelible Mrs. Harris.

Dior is exclusive.

There had to be some challenge to the story of the English cleaner who charms her way into the exclusive House.

I admit I got teary at times, mostly when Mrs. Harris was misunderstood or not seen, for being too nice but then to be understood, to bring the lightness up again; the film’s about an intelligent, honest and kind woman wanting to feel beautiful, to be acknowledged.  And that always strikes a chord.

Yes, it’s a little frothy, the wonder in Mrs. Harris’s face as she swoons at the Dior dresses, but the dresses are beautiful and there’s a consistent dry humour that balances the sweetness.

This is a delightful watch with some thought-provoking moments if you’re looking for it, that lifts.

 

Halston

Rated: MHalston

Directed by: Frédéric Tcheng

Produced by: Frédéric Tcheng

Starring: Roy Halston Frowick, Liza Minnelli, Joel Schumacher, Elsa Peretti, Tavi Gevinson.

Jackie Kennedy was surrounded. Everyone else was dressed in fur when Jackie appeared in her cloth coat and iconic pill-box hat designed by Halston for JFK’s presidential inauguration in 1961.

‘That was a day that changed fashion in America.’

Throughout the 1970s Halston was possibly the America’s most influential designer, before mysteriously disappearing from view in the ’80s.

In an attempt to piece together the life of this quintessentially American designer, a lone researcher paws through the few remaining snippets and artefacts in a basement archive when the documentary opens.

As she sifts through the meagre remnants the researcher turns to the camera and says: ‘They bought his name, sold off his work for pennies on the dollar; they took his studio and erased 250 tapes’. At the same time she coyly refuses to reveal her own name.

For a country bent on taking over the world with Coca Cola and culture, this radical erasure of an artist from the cultural pantheon is tantamount to treason. What was it about Halston that could have elicited such a dire response?

As the nameless researcher asks, ‘Whatever happened to Halston?’

That is certainly one of the questions begging an answer about this boy from the Midwest who began his career as custom milliner to New York’s wealthy elite at Bergdorf Goodman.

Early on though, the question being asked was, ‘Was Halston at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball?’ It was the event of the year for the rich the social and the beautiful, and Halston was not invited. Or was he? ‘He must have been there.’ Since it was a masked ball, no-one could be absolutely certain, but he definitely went to the ball in one sense: his masks and hats covered virtually every face and head of the attendees.

When he launched his own fashion label in 1968, Halston’s creations were designed to ‘honour the body’. Cut on the bias, the fabric moved and flowed and spiralled around the figure. Famed for cutting from a single piece of cloth, Halston’s patterns were not unlike abstract art, ‘Design reduced to its common denominators’. His elegant simplicity, an antidote to the exuberance of the ’60s.

All the society ladies were there for Halston’s first outing as a fashion designer, and before each model stepped onto the catwalk, he leant in and whispered: ‘Don’t forget, you’re the best.’

Almost overnight Halston was a sensation, but he loved to be controversial: from dressing Iman for her first runway event to staging a show as a happening, where the models sang and played guitar and clarinet.

That show was not so well received.

Fortunately Halston had other strategies.

Realising the boost that celebrities could give his name, he was the first to bring in movie stars, with Liza Minnelli enlisted for his overseas debut. With no time for rehearsals, ‘the event was directed more like a musical’. The Palace of Versailles was in uproar. ‘It was fashion in your face and it was modern.’ Halston’s name was on the international map.

‘Whatever happened to Halston?’ With his career captured in a rich cache archival footage, you will have your answer by the time the credits roll, but you may still find yourself asking: what is in a name?

Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

Rated: MWestwood: Punk, Icon, Activist

Directed by: Lorna Tucker

Edited by: Paul Carlin

Produced by: Eleanor Emptage, Shirine Best, Nicole Stott, John Battsek

Starring: Vivivenne Westwood, Andreas Kronthaler, Kate Moss.

Throughout her long career, avant garde fashion designer and activist Vivienne Westwood has been a giant safety pin digging into the side of the British establishment.

From the first little backroom shop in the King’s Road that she shared with Malcolm McLaren selling records (him) and clothing (her), Westwood claims to have invented punk, with McLaren managing (or perhaps mismanaging) the Sex Pistols and Westwood responsible for the punk aesthetic.

She has often described herself as a woman on a mission and, in the 1970s, the mission was to confront the establishment through sex. Pronouncing England as the home of the flasher, Westwood designed a line of rubber wear for the office to sell from their shop now flagrantly rebranded SEX in huge, hot pink letters.

Her designs from that time onwards have become no less confrontational, from the 1976 Destroy tee shirt calling out the establishment as fascists to the 2003 show where she sent her male models down the runway wearing fake breasts over their polo necks. Believing that clothes are deeply emotional, Westwood creates clothing, ‘to face the world in a spectacular way’, as with supermodel Carla Bruni’s 1994 appearance on a Paris catwalk in a scanty faux fur thong. At last, a fitting riposte to the 1936 surrealist Object, the fur-lined teacup.

Despite the sensation her designs create, Westwood takes a very practical approach to design. As one of her assistants observes of Vivienne and partner Andreas Kronthaler’s collaboration, ‘They work with their hands, they work on the body, they have a rapport with the body’. Westwood has been making her own clothes from an early age, and her working class background probably goes some way to explaining the campaign of guerrilla warfare she has been waging against the establishment. Far from hiding torn edges and safety pins, Westwood features them as symbols of insubordination. She wants her clothes to ‘tell a story’, one spiked with mischief and defiance.

But there is an even more personal impetus underlying both Westwood’s designs and her activism. When she was nine, Westwood was transfixed and horrified by a painting of the Crucifixion. It was a seminal moment. Since then, it has become her mission, ‘To stop people doing terrible things to each other’. Wanting to change the world, she joined a Greenpeace expedition to the Arctic Circle. The environmental devastation she witnessed there left her traumatised. Over time, her mission has become ever more focussed, homing in on the financial establishment as, ‘The rotten financial system,’ and, ‘A hydra that is destroying us’.

Even so, this Designer of the Year (twice) who performs cartwheels on the catwalk has been struggling with a conundrum common to many underground artists. As the work gains recognition, it is at the same time being subsumed into the very establishment it is agitating against.

If fashion or popular culture interest you in any way this documentary is a must-see, and for the rest of us it’s a fascinating insight into a fiercely original spirit.

 

McQueen

Rated: MA15+McQueen

Directed by: Ian Bohôte

Co-Directed & Written by: Peter Ettedgui

Produced by: Nick Taussig, Andee Ryder & Paul Van Carter

Composer: Michael Nyman

Featuring: Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen became a fashion icon for his confronting sabotage of tradition, his haute couture fashion shows exhibiting the visions from his tortured soul.

Bruised, battered and embraced by the industry, McQueen rose from humble beginnings growing up as a lad in Leeds to become head designer for Givenchy which led to backing from Dior; his label, McQueen rising as much from infamy as from his genius to create.

His shows were made to provoke emotion: revolt, repulsion, revelation.  As long as there was a reaction: “I would go to the end of my dark side and pull these horrors out of my soul and put them on the catwalk.” ― Alexander McQueen.

McQueen is a documentary pieced together like tapes from his life.  Recordings of old footage taken by friends and McQueen himself to archived interviews of the designer and those closest to him: his mother, his industry supporters such as his mentor Isabella Blow close like family, to current interviews made for the film from his older sister and nephew and colleagues including stylist Mira Chai Hyde and assistant designer Sebastian Pons.

We’re given a back-stage pass into McQueen’s life from his beginnings as a youngster obsessed with drawing dresses to his drive to succeed in a world shockingly different to the tubby, shabbily dressed boy who used his dole money to buy fabric while going back to his parents for tins of bake beans.

I’m not a fashion obsessive but it was fascinating to see the man work, to see his process and gain insight from those closet to him.  But more than anything I enjoyed seeing his creations, his fashion shows like theatre, his work like sculpture, his vision unique.

McQueen’s ability to turn garbage bags into dresses by waving his magic hands was absurd and genius.

And he was cheeky: As Detmar, Issie Blow’s husband, remembers McQueen telling the models, “You’ve got to put your pubic hair in Anna Wintour’s face. It was just very naughty behaviour.”

The film follows his life through the themes of five major works, displaying his morbid fascination of the dark with titles like, “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” his 1992 graduate college collection and “Highland Rape.”  His shows were inflammatory and macabre.

McQueen rose to fame because he didn’t care what people thought.  He rose because he took risks.

As one model states of his finale in his collection of beauty and madness in, “Voss”: ‘Fat birds and moths – isn’t that Fashion’s worst nightmare?!’

But when he became famous, that’s when his personal life began to unravel.

Director Ian Bohôte (producer of, 20,000 Days on Earth) gives us a documentary that allows the work of McQueen to speak for itself by focussing on his life through each collection – his anger after, “Search for the Golden Fleece,” his first collection designed for Givenchy, to his rebellion in, “Voss”.  We see his grief in “Plato’s Atlantis” and we see his final show before his death.

We see the tortured soul of the man as he reveals everything in his work.

As the timeline of his life moves forward, his rise to fame equals his personal downward spiral as those close to him discuss what they could see happening to McQueen.

Yet, his expression continued to amaze – his honesty and grief sometimes ethereal.

The documentary takes you on that journey showing the sensitivity of what made the man.

It’s a sad story that challenges while informing – not a celebration but more a documentation of his life: honest, like the man.

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