In Fashion Films, Truth Is Better Than Fiction

One of the things that makes me proud to work in fashion is that it is practically impossibly to parody us. Film after film that tries falls flat. Why? Because it's damn near impossible to think of something so outlandish that we haven't thought of it ourselves. Take Zoolander. Remember the showing of the Derelict collection based on the homeless? That was in 2001. John Galliano did his homeless collection in 2000. (I did like Zoolander -- the VH-1 sketch more than the movie -- but it succeeded because mostly it was models that were being parodied.) Robert Altman's 1994 Pret-A-Porter was a snore. The dueling editors played by Tracey Ullman and, um, I can't even remember who, had nothing on the real life versions -- Anna Wintour and Liz Tilberis. The same can be said for the Devil Wears Prada, which was very much a Hollywood idea of what fashion is. Now we hear Borat aka Sasha Baron Cohen is going to try his hand at a film picking on fashion. It might work -- after all, his films are only 50 percent fiction. And when it comes to fashion films, the less fiction the better.

Miramax Films/courtesy Everett Collection

By far the most successful of the fashion films to date is Unzipped, the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi. The New York Post reports that art dealer James Danziger has bought the rights to D.V., the autobiography of Diana Vreeland. He is collaborating with Nina Santisi who produced Unzipped. Vreeland's life was already turned into a successful play, Full Gallop, and Danziger's wife Lucy has been on the staff of many a Conde Nast title and currently edits Self. With all those elements in place, it would seem a hard movie to screw up. But with films about fashion, one can never say never.