Robert Altman's new film fails to impress followers of fashion

With a wriggle, a wiggle and a giggle, Sophia Loren removes one silken stocking. Then the other. Right down to the still-luscious legs, and voluptuous bosom encased in a lacy corset.

The audience at the premiere of Robert Altman’s new movie naturally kept their eyes only on her lingerie.

For this was a fashion moment. Being there in the Ziegfeld Theatre meant unlocking the roman à clef of Ready to Wear (Prêt-à-Porter) - the movie Altman shot at the Paris shows.

There in the audience was Sonia Rykiel, flame-haired, with an enigmatic smile and the outline of a bra in sequins on her sweater. And up on the screen, Anouk Aimée, smouldering with sex appeal as a Famous Female Fashion Designer mourning the death of her lover.

Above all, there was a chance for this fashion editor to spot herself: just the briefest flash, a fashion micro-second.

The editors in fashion’s real world don’t get much of a showing, in spite of all that effort jockeying for position in front of the cameras and nosing up to Kim Basinger, playing a roving television reporter. Altman certainly got her right as your typical fashion journalist: all lissom limbs, blonde hair and bee-stung lips from which pours honeyed drivel.

And oh for the life of the character played by Julia Roberts: a whimsical journalist who rolls around in bed, quaffs champagne, never bothers with the shows and is never asked to turn in a story. Laptop computers, notebooks and pens do not feature in the film any more than scissors and pins.

The fashion world had expected a coruscating, sardonic take on fashion. What we got was pure farce.

Enter the cross-dressing retailer with a penchant for sugar pink Chanel. Exit (into a closet) the fashion editor who offers a star photographer her body in return for an exclusive contract. Death by ham sandwich (was that a Jewish joke?) for the fashion executive with terrible taste in ties.

The plot is as obscure as the ending is transparent: a parade of models in the ultimate fashion show, in which nobody wears anything at all.

• In the beginning we are nude, in the end we need nothing, fashion is what happens to you in between,’ was the message handed out as guests at the Roseland ballroom partied to disco music with a scarlet-clad (formerly known as) Prince.

Ready to Wear is surreal, with genuine fashion shows, events and people interspersed with caricatures.

Altman seems to have missed the point: that fashion itself is surreal without all that cinematic effort. People slipping in dog’s mess? Not half as devastating as someone dropping a felt pen on your new Prada shoes. Why mock up a fashion show in a Métro (been there, done that years ago) but fail to film the moment at Jean-Paul Gaultier’s show when the audience started choking on fumes from the fake snow?

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• I don’t know what to say - it’s a comedy, very droll. It’s not a critique of fashion, it is a total fiction,’ said Gaultier, who made his entrance in a tiger-print jacket with Lauren Bacall.
• I was cut!’ claimed Bacall. ‘A lot of the scenes that made my character add up to more were gone.’ She plays a fashion editor deposed for a younger model (while Sally Kellerman and Tracey Ullman are competing for the favours of the photographer).

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For fashion folks, the film just didn’t come off - either as an extended skit, or as a bitchy or brutal dissection of the industry.

Although Altman started the evening by telling the audience to ‘giggle and give in and enjoy it’, the laughter came in trickles rather than torrents. Ironically, the most riveting bits were the polished excerpts from the real fashion shows.

Vivienne Westwood pronounced herself bemused. Nino Cerruti, who had costumed many of the characters, described it as ‘an amusing film’, but wondered what a non-fashion audience would make of it. Most people did not think that Altman had done for fashion with Ready to Wear what he did to the United States Army in M*A*S*H or for Hollywood in The Player.

• The Player had more story - this is a celebration - it’s only because of the paranoia of fashion people that they thought it would be something else,’ claimed Altman.
• As a film, he has been able to catch aspects of fashion in a naive way - re-editing the shows as surreal, but not getting inside the heads,’ said Gianfranco Ferré, who sat next to Sophia Loren, her bosom heaving in a black lace Dior dress he had designed for her.

Ms Loren said that the joy of the film for her was working again with Marcello Mastroianni (who falls asleep while she does her striptease). Many people said that they found her caricature of haute couture elegance one of the movie’s gems.

Kellerman, chic in a white Donna Karan pantsuit, said she had most fun being locked in a closet with Mastroianni. Karan praised the naked fashion show as the ‘ultimate fashion statement’, while her daughter, Gaby, said her mother was mad because she had for years harboured the same idea.

Like life imitating art, the party aped the movie, with the Spanish actress, Rossy de Palma, gyrating around the dance floor in a dress made out of a shawl and a garter belt. Drag queens posed for the paparazzi, and models posed for each other.

At the end, Rupert Everett, Anouk Aimée’s son in the movie, wrapped himself in a Russian greatcoat to face the frosty Manhattan night.

• I don’t think the movie is really an in-depth microscopic view of the fashion industry,’ he said. ‘It’s about using fashion motifs for a Feydeau-type farce about characters in a comedy of errors.’

But in all the fun and frolics, the real emotion of fashion, the drama of creation, the orgasms of excitement, even the visual energy, seem to have hit the cutting room floor.

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