HI AGAIN I'm a bit drunk and i went to see In Fabric which is a high camp horror movie about a dress that kills people (seriously) (THIS IS THE MET GALA THEME DONE RIGHT); it may or may not be intentionally camp, but it is camp, that's for sure.
so today i had work and then met a friend and her gf and i had a robot cocktail and one (1) beer (??? who is she ??? im rebranding, the old nicky can't come to the phone right now, she's dead, etc etc) and then i went to see in fabric (it's the second paragraph and that means I'm bored of capitalising babey, we're informal here, get used 2 it). all i knew about it was that it was a ~thriller / ~~horror about a dress that kills people and …. that's very much what it is. not very thrilly or indeed horrory, mostly just incredibly funny shots of this dress, like, malevolently hovering above people while they sleep (this happens at least 3 times). I don't know if it's supposed to be hilarious, but i had the time of my life. anyway, onto the review (that's right, this is a review. genre is dead, objectivity is a lie, strap in) –
the film is structured in a kind of two-act narrative, beginning with sheila, a recently divorced bank clerk who lives in the thames valley with her son whose goth girlfriend keeps coming over and being rude and they have lots of inconsiderately loud kinky sex. sheila buys herself a nice dress to go on a date, which turns out to be a bust, but then …. Weird Stuff Happens !!
the dress turns up in odd places, like in sheila's son's room, making sheila think the girlfriend has been borrowing it without permission (and possibly that it has participated in their weird sex life). it destroys their washing machine ?? things start going badly for sheila at work (this may or may not be related). alongside this, we see creepy stuff going on behind the scenes in the store where sheila bought the dress; the shop assistants are all bald (?? strong throwback to roald dahl's witches tbh) and do weird homoerotic-but-performed-for-the-male-gaze things with mannequins. suddenly, the sheila plot ends and we now follow reg, a washing machine repairman, who is given the dress – shock, horror, weird stuff starts happening to him (and his fiancée babs), too.
when i first heard about this film i thought, excellent, another movie about fashion and death (not sarcasm). and while watching, i thought quite a bit of both phantom thread and personal shopper; the intersection – or maybe correlation is a better word – between fashion and death, beauty and terror (personal shopper is about someone, played by kristen stewart, who is the personal shopper to someone rich and famous; the film mostly consists of kristen stewart driving around on a motorbike looking cool / trying on super fancy clothes (LIKE THIS DRESS I'M STILL OBSESSED WITH THREE MONTHS ON) / also trying to contact her dead brother. phantom thread is not actually very supernatural it is mostly just daniel day lewis('s character) being a dick, mostly to women, and making some dresses; i was v disappointed at the lack of literal phantoms in the movie. no, i jest; this film, too, is about obsessive, fetishistic behaviour, and mourning, and power dynamics).
despite being thought of as vacuous and shallow and superficial, fashion (by which i mean both Normal Clothes & Fashion™) is a huge part of life and speaks to perennial human concerns about life and death and identity and class and gender and so on and so on. in all of these films, fashion is either implicitly or explicitly linked with death; the joy we find in beauty is directly related to the horror of its absence. beauty consoles, but it also terrifies; the threat of that loss is always there. especially when, as in in fabric, that beauty is materialist – the department store where the dress first appears plays a huge part in the story, and there is almost a critique of capitalist consumerism at play. the desire to have things is a protection against not having, but it also carries with it the fear of losing; having and then not having; having had. whatever tennyson thinks, it is not always better to have loved and lost. the accumulation of material things to defend against anxiety just increases the anxiety that they might one day be taken away.
beyond this, though, there is something terrible about beauty, as one of donna tartt's characters says. things which are truly beautiful are powerful, and that’s terrifying; the literary concept of the sublime isn’t purely to do with beautiful things, but it’s to do with grandeur, which is close (fun fact: the sublime doesn’t stem from the romantics! it’s actually first introduced by longinus in the first or third century, but because wordsworth was so into it we think of it as a romantic invention). aesthetic power is a legitimate kind of power. things which are beautiful are unattainable, frightening, otherworldly, supernatural – all fashion movies should also be horror movies, imo, with the exception of devil wears prada because it is a perfect film. the fashion industry and the beauty industry are twin pillars of nightmarish capitalist exploitation and evil, and therefore excellent fodder for scary movies!! anyway, beauty is terror, i will die on this hill and for further reading on the subject u should go to arabelle sicardi, one of my fave writers; they write about fashion and beauty and doom and their instagram stories are amazinnn.
in fabric recognises that beauty is inextricable from sex as well as death. in the aforementioned performed-homoeroticism scene (i mean that literally, there is actually a man standing there watching the entire time, the scene is enacted specifically for his pleasure (is it feminist, to literalise the male gaze ?? to include it in the narrative and possibly draw a comparison btw the audience and the creepy old man ??? probably not really)) – in that scene, blood is erotic, stylised into something that bridges the arenas of death and sex. its aesthetic power is magnified by the twin lenses of eroticism and the threat of death; it is dangerous and exciting, there is power involved, pain and pleasure. the dress's involvement in sheila's son's sex life is a parallel to this – he and his girlfriend are into bondage, and the dress seems drawn to them, again drawing out questions of power and pain. in fabric is about the social and functional aspects of fashion, but it’s also about the ideas behind it, the hope that this dress will make you sexy, that it will make you young and beautiful and stave off the decay and death which lurk just behind the frame.
in fabric is about a lot of things – it kind of tries to be about capitalism, but i don’t think the shop scenes accrue into a meaningful critique; there’s some witty indictments of management culture and bureaucracy, although again i wish these had been developed further. most of all, though, it’s about the most base of human instincts: the desire to be loved and lovable, to be in control, to be powerful. at its heart, it’s about the trinity of beauty, sex, and death.
okay anyway i have to go, i have a pizza and a whole episode of love island waiting for me, ciao amicie
[disclaimer: i wrote this while sobering up on the train home last night and then formatted it today so i'm not drunk at the moment of sending, nor about to eat pizza, more's the pity]
closing thought:
coincidentally i also saw toy story 4 this week, which was excellent; finally, the toy story franchise takes on that most basic of human impulses: the death drive. just like toy story 3 recognised that it could attract the franchise's original audience by reeling them in with a double whammy of nostalgia and a coming of age tale about moving on from the past, toy story 4 appeals to that same audience – now a little older, more jaded, no longer excited about heading off to university / to see the world; just bitter about all their student debt – by introducing a new character who literally thinks he is trash and cannot comprehend that he is loved, and keeps trying to chuck himself into the bin. highkey relatable. in this house we stan forky.
