Films for Fashionistas -- C 'est Un Rêve!

Here's my latest fashionista film discovery:


Yves Saint Laurent - His Life and Times/5 Avenue Marceau 75116 Paris

This DVD contains two documentaries by the same director. The first is a fairly traditional sit-down-with-a-camera-and-interview-the-subject-and-those-close-to-him sort of summation of, well, his life & times. There are interviews with Saint Laurent himself, his business & personal partner of many, many years, Pierre Bergé, muses like Betty Catroux & Loulou de la Falaise, and other people who worked with Saint Laurent during his 50 years in fashion. The interviews are intercut with wonderful footage from past fashion shows, odd old black & white television advertisements, clips from interviews with Saint Laurent when he was a young, young man, and other fun historical nuggets. Saint Laurent talks -- quelle surprise! -- about his mother and in this film we actually get to meet Maman. (And she is lovely.)

It's a short film (the two together run less than 90 minutes) and far from a comprehensive study of Saint Laurent's influence and influences, but it's well worth watching. It's a little stunning to realize just how incredibly young he was when he took over Dior (barely 22).

It's also fairly apparent that M. Saint Laurent suffered from a mood disorder, undergoing bouts of depression that his friends speak of in guarded and elliptical terms. His struggles with substance abuse in the 70's and 80's have been well-documented, and he was hospitalized for "stress" and "exhaustion" and the like repeatedly over the course of his life. By the time this film was made (in 2001) he is obviously ill and at times seems terribly frail. There are many poignant moments in the film when he talks about his (happy) childhood and both the joy and sadness that his life in fashion have brought him. Saint Laurent seems all-too-terribly human in this film -- not a fortress of ego like Karl Lagerfeld or a marketing machine like Marc Jacobs, but an artist at times bewildered by his own talent and often hostage to his own demons and black dogs.

The second part of this DVD is the fashion documentary I've been searching for. Ten minutes in, I hit the pause button on my remote, marched over to my computer, and ordered the DVD from Amazon. I needed to own it. If you are a fiend for the actual design and construction of clothing, this is your movie. The process being observed is the run-up to one of Saint Laurent's final Haute Couture shows (one of the reasons YSL is so important to fashion history is that he is usually credited with being the first haute couture designer who opened a full-fledged ready-to-wear business, but he continued to design haute couture until 2002) and if you're a construction ho like me, it is absolutely enthralling. I watched this film like a 13-year old boy watches his first dirty movie -- on the edge of my seat, mouth agape, wineglass forgotten on the coffee table in front of me. This is hard-core fashion porn. Designs are followed from sketch to toile to final fabric choices, with models parading before Saint Laurent and Loulou de la Falaise (who wears a seemingly endless series of perfectly-fitting trousers and blouses with big statement-y pieces of jewelry tossed on in just the perfect way -- oh, I want to be her when I grow up!) and Anne-Marie Munoz, who worked with Saint Laurent from his early days at Dior. Bless director David Teboul's heart, he just plunks the camera down on a tripod and lets it roll, showing us long, uninterrupted, unedited takes of staring, judging, tweaking, and discussing the designs. You get a real feel for how painstaking and stop-and-go the process is as Saint Laurent and his sidekicks chat about the placement of a pleat or the shape of a collar. But it's not just talk. Teboul also goes into the workrooms and films the garments actually being made. We get to see the hands and hear the voices of the tailors and seamstresses who construct these beautiful garments. Saint Laurent , at least in this film, is a kind and respectful boss who beams at the employees who bring his designs to life and thanks them profusely. The appreciation seems reciprocated -- there is no disguising the pride of one of the head seamstresses as the gorgeous dress she has nursed into creation swings and sways and swoops across the salon in front of Saint Laurent, followed by a murmured string of his favorite compliments: "Ravissant! Ravissant! C'est un rêve!" It's by far the best representation I've seen yet of what goes on deep inside an atelier and made me want nothing more than to go and sit quietly on stool in the corner in that studio and just watch & learn. These men and women have already forgotten more about design, construction, ornament, fabric -- all the building blocks of fashion -- than I will ever learn in my lifetime. It's awe-inspiring, at least to me. Click here for a sample of what I'm talking about.

These films are definitely worth your time, especially if you're as big a fan of Yves Saint Laurent as I am, or if you appreciate the skill and time that goes into creating a truly artful piece of clothing. This DVD, especially the "Avenue Marceau" segment, is going to be one of my rainy-day movies -- you know, the ones you pop into the player when it's gray & rainy & you've got nothing to do but stay home and snuggle into the couch and entertain yourself with your favorite dish of cinematic comfort food. Highly, highly recommended.


Images: Guardian.co.uk, elle.com

Films for Fashionistas

Last weekend I watched this:

Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton

My denim guru Broc turned me on to this movie and I'm really glad he did. Here's a taste:





If you have any love for or curiosity about fashion and what goes into the creation of a collection and a fashion show, I highly recommend this movie. If your interest in this sort of thing is strictly that of a love of documentaries, ehhhhhh, not so much. The filmmaker also serves as the narrator for the movie, and while he provides a pleasantly casual, slightly quirky tone, I'm not always sure of his point of view of his subject. Nonetheless, there is a lot of juicy footage in here for fashion lovers.

The thrust of the film is preparations leading up to the Spring 2007 collections for both Jacobs' namesake label and Louis Vuitton. It's worth looking at those two collections side by side to get a good feeling for the overlap and intersect that seems to happen with Jacobs and the two lines he creates.

Louis Vuitton, S/S 07

Marc Jacobs, S/S 07

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, and given that Jacobs' design seems to come so much from his interior world & imagination, it makes perfect sense. He seems less concerned with making a commercial product than many designers working today, and he truly does seem to pull his work from some personal well of inspiration. Whether his so-far excellent track record of producing Just the Thing That Everyone Has to Have This Season collection after collection is a result of an uncanny ability to read what's in the air or an equally uncanny ability to create something so irresistible that everybody wants it is impossible to determine, of course, and probably not important. The fact of it -- that's what's important.

I've made a lot of cracks about Marc Jacobs on this blog, because despite having no problem giving him props for his amazing talent as a designer, what I read of his real-life behavior makes me think I wouldn't be crazy about him as a person. I have to say, in this documentary he comes off as not such a bad guy. I'm well-aware that skillful editing can create just about any tone a filmmaker desires in his work, but there are an awful lot of people in this film saying awfully nice things about Jacobs, and he has a good many employees who've been with him for a very long time, which says a lot.

And he works those employees -- hard -- in the run-ups to the two shows. There are sleepless nights and blistered fingers and seamstresses & assistants so exhausted they dissolve into helpless fits of hysterical giggles over their work. Garments are being sewn right down to the wire and appear backstage at the very last millisecond and sometimes not at all. This is a great behind-the-scenes look at exactly how much backbreaking work goes into these productions on every side, and suddenly Jacobs' famously-late show starts make sense. The exhaustion is palpable -- even the models can sometimes barely hold it together. There's a scene in which one of them (Tanya Dziahileva, I think) is backstage before the Marc Jacobs show, face blotchy and eyes a positive waterfall of tears -- so much makeup has been troweled onto and then scraped off this poor girl's face by the end of NY Fashion Week that her body appears to have simply thrown in the towel and rejected it in a massive allergic response. It doesn't look all that fun or glamorous from that vantage point.

(She recovers, bless her, and gets to wear one of my favorite looks in the show.)

There's a lot of time spent on the creative process of the collections, which is fascinating. We also get a good dose of "What Inspires Marc," from stories about his impressive personal collection of art and meetings with his heroes and heroines of the art world like Takashi Murakami, with whom he made those famous must-have LV bags.

They appeared on the runway in the S/S 03 shows and spawned a frenzy of frothy-mouthed bag lust, waiting lists as long as a supermodel's legs, and a million counterfeits & knockoffs. After these bad boys, my guess is the PTB at Vuitton basically handed Jacobs the keys to the kingdom and went & had themselves a Pernod. I don't even wanna know how much money those things brought in to that company.

Speaking of bags, if you watch the film on DVD, do not ignore the "Special Features" section, which has some clips that didn't make it into the main body of the movie. My favorite is a long section detailing the construction of this monster

The amount of blood, sweat, & tears that goes into the creation of this bag will blow you away, as will the pride and dedication of the craftspeople in the Vuitton workroom, who struggle for days to build this thing in time for the show. It's a hugely complicated piece of work, and watching this does go a long way to explaining the prices on those dingdong Vuitton bags. (Only 12, I think, of these bags were actually produced, and if memory serves they sold for €35,000 apiece. That roughs out to about 50,000 bucks.)

There is an engaging moment when, asked about his inspiration process, Jacobs comes out and confesses that it's really not anything all that complicated or magical. He takes stuff in, he thinks about it, ideas percolate in his brain, he puts them on paper. To his credit, he doesn't seem overly impressed with his own genius.

It's doubtful this is a perfectly accurate portrait of Jacobs. For one thing, Bernard Arnault, who is Jacobs' boss at Vuitton and makes several appearance in this film, is a guy with a LOT of drag in France. My guess is that a doc originally produced for French television that shredded the prize horse in his stable would have been a notion quickly quashed. And obviously it wasn't Prigent's purpose to make a warts-and-all kind of film. From a purely film-review perspective, I'm not entirely sure what Prigent's aim was, because the tone and the techniques of the thing can jump around pretty wildly. Despite this, it really is a fascinating couple of hours spent looking into the inner workings of some pretty fashion-y goings-on.

So. Style Spy says: Two stilettos up for this film! Absolutely see it if you get the chance.


Photos: Style.com