Anna Wintour (above) watches the runways at New York Fashion Week in The September Issue. Audrey Tautou (inset) plays designer Coco Chanel in Coco avant Chanel.

Credit: supplied

MOVIES: The fashion world goes to the movies

For fashionphiles, the famine has officially begun. Those who have lately subsisted on a steady diet of runway shows (New York, Paris, Milan, London, Vancouver, and, most recently, Toronto) will definitely feel the pain of withdrawal. Fruitless internet searches will offer up nothing you haven’t seen before. From the standpoint of spectacle, fashion is finished — at least until spring.

Sartorialists in Vancouver may find themselves at something of an advantage, though, as we’re only just on the cusp of premiering three new fashion-related movies that earlier this year kept acid tongues wagging in fashion capitals around the globe. (Sometimes being months behind the chic crowd can be a blessing: We still have something to look forward to.) That argument might sound lame, considering that fashion is all about the next big thing, but when one has a sow’s ear, one should endeavour to fashion a silk purse.

That’s exactly what director R.J. Cutler does in his finely wrought documentary, THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE (4 stars out of 5). Cutler and crew are given unfettered access to the notoriously icy high priestess of fashion, American Vogue editrix Anna Wintour, and her team as they assemble the venerable style bible’s September, 2007 issue — the largest single issue of any magazine in the history of publishing.

Those hoping (as I did) for one of “Nuclear” Wintour’s fabled dressings-down to be caught for posterity will be somewhat disappointed. As the diminutive strongwoman jets from Condé Nast’s Times Square tower to ritzy hotels in Paris (to literally tell designers what to make and buyers what to buy), the fashion world at the height of its influence and decadence serves as a glittering backdrop — one that has all but disappeared today. (Just last week, Vogue announced its first staff layoffs.)

When not travelling about, Wintour frequently butts heads with Grace Coddington, the magazine’s creative director. A red-maned giantess compared to Wintour’s elfin frame, the former 1960s fashion model chafes under the dictates and decisions of her boss, especially as she watches one of her layouts get whittled down behind her back.

Coddington has been crowned by many as the true star of the documentary, and, from a film standpoint, she is. The perennial underdog, hers is a more animated, artistic, and engaging personality than Wintour’s. But fashionistas might have a different take. Coddington’s the best fashion stylist in the world bar none, but when Wintour casts aside one of her intricate shots because it doesn’t flow with the others, it’s the right decision.

One of the film’s shortcomings is its cloying attempt to humanize Wintour by trotting out her daughter, or having her wax about her aloof father or her estranged brothers and sisters — a ploy that ultimately fails. Wintour remains inscrutable from beginning to end, because she knows the power that comes from an air of mystery.

If only director Anne Fontaine and the team behind the biopic COCO AVANT CHANEL (2 stars out of 5) had heeded that lesson. In the film, Audrey Tautou plays iconic designer Coco Chanel when she was Gabrielle Chanel, a poor orphan with a singular sense of style who schemes and sleeps her way to her own thriving couture house.

Those expecting the glamour of Chanel’s real-life Cinderella story will be sorely disappointed. The film is almost exclusively concerned with Gabrielle’s early, insecure years as a kept woman in a manor house. Dressed in severe clothing of her own design, Tautou’s Chanel spends the majority of her time glaring at high-society ladies in their frou-frou ensembles and muttering under her breath. The rest is eaten up by Tatou’s signature vacant stare.

Things pick up somewhat in the final third of the film, when Chanel meets and falls for Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), her lover’s British business manager and the man who eventually stakes her burgeoning fashion empire. But it’s not enough to engage a now wearied viewer. By the time the film closes (having conveniently skipped the war years when she was a Nazi sympathizer), Coco sits on her iconic mirrored staircase in Paris as models drift by in gorgeous gowns. The payoff for her — immortality, power, privilege, respect — is obvious. For an audience, it’s definitely less so.

And speaking of payoffs, did you know what black people go through with their hair? Did you know weaves can cost up to $10,000? That ‘black’ hair products are a $9-billion-a-year industry? That some men will look at a woman and decide from her hair if he can afford to date her? In his documentary, GOOD HAIR (3 stars out of 5), comedian Chris Rock gets to the roots of this particular cultural obsession.

From Atlanta’s annual Bonner Bros. trade show, where stylists compete in over-the-top hairdressing competitions choreographed to techno music, to temples in India where the religious rite of tonsure supplies a demand for straight human hair, Rock investigates what black folks are willing to do to get “good” (read: Caucasian-looking) hair.

At times hilarious and unsettling, Good Hair uses confessional-style interviews with Hollywood leading ladies, interspersed with scenes of Rock hanging out and shooting the breeze in beauty and barber shops across America. Why, he asks, are we willing to put ourselves through this? Why are girls as young as four getting perms with chemicals that cause blindness? And, perhaps most importantly, why the hell can’t black men touch their woman’s head?

Sometimes surprising and always entertaining Rock’s film proves that as fashion lovers go, he’s a talented comedian.