Ready-to-Wear. - movie reviews

Christian Century, March 8, 1995 by Margaret R. Miles

"Have you re-invented yourself lately? If not, maybe it's time for a change." --advertisement for a women's magazine

"Fashion? Well, here's the main thing: it's fun." --New Yorker (Nov. 7,1994)

WHAT HAS fashion to do with religion? Fashion is play, is serious. Fashion for the moment, religion for a lifetime and whatever is beyond a lifetime. The world of fashion didn't concern itself with religion until recently and briefly when, influenced by Madonna, runway models started wearing large crosses. Yet Christianity has perennially been concerned with fashion.

Two attitudes toward dress have characterized Western Christianity. Augustine argued in City of God that dress belongs to culture, differs according to culture, and has no significance in a Christian life. But Clement in Alexandria and Tertullian in Carthage both gave detailed advice to women on appropriate Christian dress.

Clement addressed both men and women, advising them to avoid ostentation, along with faddish hair styles and makeup. Tertullian's advice to women is more notorious. Concerned about mens--his own, he acknowledges--vulnerability to, seduction, he urged women to make themselves ugly through neglect and to veil themselves for good measure. Devotional manuals through the Christian West also offered counsel on Christian dress. It would be too extreme to say that dress--especially women's dress--has been an obsession of Christian male authors; it has been a pervasive concern, however.

Robert Altman's film Ready-to-Wear brings to mind several underlying relationships between fashion and religion. First, neither religion nor fashion exists in the abstract; each exists in a concrete world of political, institutional and social arrangements. Fashion relates more explicitly to a particular Historical moment and society; the word "fad," a near-synonym for fashion, is an acronym: "for a day." But religion also must continuously maintain and articulate itself in relation to particular needs and interests if it is to retain its ability to address people. Moreover, the cultural tasks of each are similar in some respects: both seek to provide resources for shaping the desires and identities of individuals and communities.

Ready-to-Wear is a send-up of fashion's most glamorous event, the Pret-a-Porter runway show in Paris at which fashion designers show their current collections. The press release states that the film is about clothing as disguise, as revealing identity, as tools of power, and as keys to a mystery." Although women's clothing is showcased in the Paris collections, men in the film are as concerned with clothing as women. As a black taxi driver remarks, "All white guys look alike to me. The clothes, that's how I tell everyone apart."

The plot is slim. The apparent murder of the unpopular head of the fashion council is being investigated. The audience already knows he has choked to death on a ham sandwich, so no attention is taken away from fashion and the people who live for it--journalists, models, designers and hangers-on. Their various encounters create the dramas surrounding the shows. Even the laughs are minimalist. After about six different people step in dog excrement, the joke wears thin.

Altman's docudrama was filmed at the 1994 spring collection. Taking roles patterned on actual fashion-world figures, Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts, Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimee, Tim Robbins, Stephen Rea, Forest Whittaker and Kim Basinger star in the stories-within-the-story. As in Altman's The Player, many famous faces make cameo appearances--fashion designers and models as well as such actors as Danny Aiello, Lili Taylor and (playing themselves) Harry Belafonte and Cher.

Cher makes one of the film's few references to a world outside the Paris shows. When asked, "What do you think of ready-to-wear?" Cher replies: "I think it's sad. It's about the loneliness of women. I'm a victim as well as a perpetrator. I think it's not about what you put on your body, but what you are inside." Altman comments in a press release that Cher's speech "cut to the heart of what the film is trying to say." The other reference to a larger world occurs when Lili Taylor, playing a New York Times photojournalist, asks Anouk Aimee a routine question; Aimee protests, "Why doesn't anyone ask real questions?" "All right," Taylor replies, "How do you feel about the fact that 50 percent of the world's pollution is caused by textile mills?"

Good filmmaker that he is, Altman doesn't preach. He spoofs the fashion world by showing its preoccupations as vacuous, trendy and meanspirited. But the fashion world Altman shows is suspiciously one-dimensional. No one in Altman's fashion industry is talented and hard-working. No one cares about other people apart from their professional or sexual utility. And behavior has no physical or moral repercussions.

Laughingly confessing that she has "a little problem with alcohol," julia Roberts (who wears a shirt that says "the world's greatest mom") falls into bed with a stranger and stays there throughout the shows on which she is supposed to be reporting. Nothing in the film questions this behavior. After days during which champagne arrives every time they are on-camera, the lovers part, thanking each other politely for a "great time"--and looking gorgeous.