We’re coming up to the end of another Fashion week in NYC. Besides the impact on our wardrobes (hot tip: burn everything you own), the economic significance of this biannual congregation of designers, models and magazine editors is set to be as big as ever. According to a report released this week by NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, Fashion Week injects,over $900 million to the NY economy.
But whilst the business of fashion flourishes on the East Coast, movies about it have recently been a source of frequent disappointment in Hollywood.
Though it may have felt to nostalgic millennials that the first Zoolander movie was a sweeping success, the film performed pretty poorly at the box office almost exactly fifteen years ago. Recent recycle Zoolander 2, which continued the exploits of Derek Zoolander and his signature ‘Blue Steel’ look, was even more of a flop. The recent big screen outing of cult BBC TV fashion comedy Absolutely Fabulous proved anything but either side of the Atlantic.
It’s a historic pattern where fashion flicks are concerned. Robert Altman’s Prêt-à- Porter (French for “Ready To Wear”) was set to be one of the defining cultural films of the nineties. But Julia Roberts, Sophia Loren, Rupert Everett, Björk,Cher, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer and two whole minutes of nude female models were not enough to drag audiences in to the cinema for a silver-screen slice of the industry.
PRET A PORTER
(Ready to Wear) – 1994Robert Altman pic.twitter.com/npMmvvJL86
— Rosanna Allegrucci (@Publicante) February 1, 2016
Americans spent $380 billion on fashion in 2015 alone, but do the vast majority merely care that their clothes keep them comfortable and/or get them laid? Perhaps the appeal of high- fashion flicks is simply too niche. Or maybe the basis of their poor performance is that fashion flicks are generally made by unattractive elderly producers who don’t know — or care — what really happens inside the industry. It wouldn’t mark the first time that Hollywood has based its insight on tired stereotypes and easy cliches with a short shelf life, sprinkled with a distracting mist of glamour.
Perhaps it’s focusing on the fun, frivolous side of fashion that movie bosses are missing the real dramatic gold. This is a sentiment echoed by Vin, one half of, Vin and Omi, the fashion design duo brought in to create outfits including “a dissolvable flower dress that morphs into a latex amphibious wetsuit for when one of the stars falls off a boat into London’s Thames river” for Absolutely Fabulous.
He explains to Heat Street: “Movies like Ab Fab and the Zoolander films are, in part, a very good representation of the fashion industry. It is in the main pretentious, ridiculous and full of really horrible people. … But films about fashion only really skim the surface and concentrate on the fun, ridiculous side.”
International brainwashing and assassination plots? Hiding from supermodel PR scandals in the South of France? Compared to the reality of what most people inside the industry actually experience, the plot of fashion flicks seem shallow and unsophisticated.
According to Vin, “Films like Zoolander could have gone much further into the dark and twisted world of plagiarism, model abuse, racism, poor working conditions and the f**king blanket rudeness and elitism that flows through the profession.”
As he suggests, “the little-seen underbelly of the larger brands and the reality of mid-range and smaller brands has a lot of material just waiting to be used.”
Would audiences rather see the fiendish reality of the fashion world or watch Ben Stiller farting around in a toupee, or Julia Roberts pretending to speak French? I know what I’d pay to watch.
Absolutely Fabulous: Cracking open the champagne…at least until the box office receipts come in
Jacob Crosby (a real life Blue Steel) knows the high-glamor world of male modeling more than most and he agrees that fashion-based blockbusters give a fairly accurate representation of that side of the industry. “Zoolander is, all told, a pretty spot on satire of some elements of male modeling,” he admits.
But Jacob insists that audiences just aren’t as easily beguiled by the industry’s glamorous top layer anymore. “Zoolander and Ab Fab are both franchises that were founded in previous generations who saw the fashion industry as unreachable and alien, whereas today it’s very accessible. People can become bloggers or models from their own home on their phone, so the high-glamour fantasy side is increasingly less appealing or relevant.
Perhaps it’s time film producers realized audiences don’t want another tired look at the glossy, ridiculous side of the industry. The outrageous escapism and jinks of the highest kind that film studios are serving up are clearly not giving people what they want. We’d rather see the warts-and- all underbelly.
