Filming The Fashion Game -- Altman's `Ready To Wear' Fits Fashion Industry To A T

This is not an unbiased review of Robert Altman's new movie "Ready to Wear," which opens here on Christmas Day.

I will leave that to my discerning and knowledgeable colleagues, The Seattle Times movie reviewers. They know Altman's work inside out, can pick apart his seams, snip at the loose threads and frayed edges, and pass judgment on whether the film is an original or just a tired redraping of his same old material worked up in this year's colors.

This story is for people who love fashion or, if they don't exactly love it, are snared by its siren call of glamour and fantasy.

And this is for the women and men who pass over People magazines and furtively reach for Vogue or Harper's Bazaar in dentists' waiting rooms. Now that Altman, a director with a keen eye for the glittery as well as the grotesque aspects of glamorous industries, has disclosed his fascination with fashion, you can all come out of the closet.

In short: See the movie. It's fabulous. Funny, too.

It's a satire close enough to reality that the fashion industry has been uncomfortably abuzz ever since Altman announced his plans to make a movie on the Paris fashion industry a couple of years ago after accompanying his wife to a show in 1984. Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino and some other designers, remembering the less-than-flattering portrait of Hollywood Altman portrayed in the "The Player," banned his film crews from their shows, where he wanted to shoot documentary footage. (And now that the movie has opened in New York, some big-name designers, editors and fashion reporters are denouncing the movie as a mean-spirited distortion of their industry.)

But other designers agreed to play cameo roles. Tattooed Thierry Mugler comes off sounding like the playground hood. Then there's Christian Lacroix, dressed like the leader of the Lollipop Guild in his on-screen interview with television fashion reporter Kim Basinger.

The result is a movie bursting at the seams with clothes from the sublime to the outrageous. (Though I, for one, would have been happy to have had the camera linger a bit longer on all of them.)

There are runway snippets of Lacroix's fantasy ensembles of metallic paisleys and shimmering silks topped with gypsy princess headdresses. There are elegantly cut suits by Gianfranco Ferre, who is also responsible for Sophia Loren's campiest "vintage" Diors. Ferre, who designs for the Dior label as well as his own, created the hourglass black dresses the still cartoonishly curvy Loren pours herself into. Celebrated French milliner Jean Barthet, who has designed millinery for Claude Montana, Sonia Rykiel and others, created Loren's saucer-sized hats, a spoof on the extravagantly swooping hats Dior showed with his New Look in the '50s. There are also glimpses of saucy street fashion by Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Fashion followers will immediately note that the clothes supposedly designed by Anouk Amiee, who plays a chic French designer not dissimilar to Sonia Rykiel, who plays herself, are from the fall 1994 collection of designer Nino Cerruti. Cerruti is an Italian whose elegant lines make him a spiritual blood brother to Giorgio Armani.

The outrageous 19th-century-inspired tart-wear supposedly created by fictional designer Cort Romney, played with unbridled foppishness by Richard E. Grant, is from Vivienne Westwood's fall collection. Westwood is the British doyenne of high camp fashion. She built bustles into dresses for her recent fall collection.

The deconstructed urban/tribal clothes by fictional designer Cy Bianco, played by actor Forest Whitaker, are from the fall collection of Xuly Bet, a young, Paris-based, Afro-European designer known for his melding of flea-market finds and traditional African styles.

One scene in the movie takes place at Cy Bianco's fashion show. In the style of many young, avant-garde designers who like to snub their noses at the fashion mainstream, he decides to hold it in an obscure site. Though most Paris shows are now held at The Louvre, Bianco holds his in a hot, stifling subway station. To anyone who has ever attended fashion shows where the level of physical discomfort, inconvenience and even danger foisted upon the audience is meant to signal the originality of the designer's latest collection, the scene is all too familiar.

Since the movie is set in Paris, don't expect to see any fashions by American designers such as Donna Karan or Calvin Klein, who show in New York. Though its influence has in recent decades been diminished by the great success of Milan's fashion industry, not to mention New York's lock on sportswear and more casual fashion, Paris will always be the historical home of high fashion.

"Ready to Wear" also spotlights the industry's less appealing side. The movie oozes with back-biting, superficiality, air kissing, dark glasses, snittiness, bitchiness, hype, Darwinian survival, money-grubbing and posturing. The attitude of most of the designers, fashion-magazine editors and Stephen Rea, who plays the world's most sought-after and ill-mannered fashion photographer, makes the demeanor of celebrity rappers seem relatively self-effacing in comparison.

And, of course, there are the models, though the most famous supermodels, including Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni and Naomi Campbell, appear mainly in documentary footage from real shows that is seamlessly woven into the movie. One real model who has a minor cameo role, however, is the young, coltish, (read gallumphing) Eve Salvail, whose trademark is her shaved and tattooed head. (Think Sinead O'Connor with a tattoo, only younger.)

Salvail is a real model who came on the scene a couple of years ago when Calvin Klein and other designers introduced the waif look. Other models in the movie, particularly the ones in the climactic last scene, which I won't unveil here, are not household names among fashion groupies, though they are all professional models. Most of them seen in the revealing last scene will look to many movie viewers like gawky, underfed teenagers, which is what many of them are.

The fashion media - and the cream-puff language that the fashion industry uses to discuss itself - are spoofed with delicious accuracy. In one memorable exchange, Basinger sticks her microphone in front of Lacroix and gushes about how "perfect" his show was. Unfortunately she can think of nothing solid to ask him, so asks, ". . . Uh, what was perfect for you this morning?"

Apparently finding nothing ridiculous about the question, Lacroix replies, "Perfection for me? It doesn't exist. Never. In fashion, we are never satisfied."

The irony is that the scene was not scripted. Miramax Films says that real designers who appear as themselves in "Ready to Wear" ad-libbed their lines. Basinger's is exactly the kind of fluffy question they expect, and for which they have ready - if meaningless - answers.

People who've seen "Ready to Wear" in previews and know I've covered fashion keep asking, `Is it really like that?' I think back to my time covering the New York runway fashion shows, where the editors of the world's major fashion magazines sweep in like rival queens, where movie celebrities and Park Avenue socialites vie for attention, and where designers are treated like oracles, and I can't help but reply with a qualified affirmative.

Altman's take on the fashion industry is the most talked about recent interpretation of the fashion industry, though hardly the only one. Earlier this year Comedy Central, a cable network, started running a popular British sitcom that spoofs the fashion industry called "Absolutely Fabulous." And in Hollywood the lifestyles of young models is the premise for an evening soap opera. Meanwhile, Isaac Mizrahi has made a documentary of his own career as a designer though it has yet to be released.

Until then, see "Ready to Wear." The clothes, runway shots and attitude are easily worth the price of admission.