A run of current and upcoming designer-themed dramas—the excellent Cristobal Balenciaga as of last week (if you were lucky enough to to see it in Europe as I was; US release date coming soon), Kaiser Karl and The New Look on the horizon—might finally shake off the idea that onscreen stories about fashion and the people who make it, create it, nay, divine it, never work. Perhaps it’s the historical aspect that helps these productions shine, as recent efforts have been able to cleave to the designs that those couturiers actually created. It makes the fashion part—which is always tricky to get right—all the more believable and, yes, less cringey. (The costuming in Cristobal Balenciaga is utterly fantastic and done with absolute historical verisimilitude—just one of this series’s highlights.)
Runway Zero in all this is, very likely, The Phantom Thread from 2017—even if Daniel Day Lewis’s fictional twisted genius borrowed soupcons of a few different real-life designers to make up his Reynolds Woodcock character. (You’re not alone if you thought some of his gowns looked very Charles James.) But while we’re all going to tune in to see the above dramas from Disney+ and Apple TV, who would we love to see given the filmic treatment next? Herewith, just a few candidates—but there could have been so easily more. (We didn’t get to Willi Smith, or Claude Montana, or Stephen Sprouse, or Ann Lowe, or Kenzo Takada—but someone should.)
Vivienne Westwood
Derek Hudson/Getty Images
You can argue amongst yourselves as to who should play Dame Vivienne Westwood, but what we can all agree on: Her incredible life and even more incredible talent would make her a more than worthy biopic subject. She might have started out as a teacher—and her design career certainly retained a didactic approach, with Westwood variously illuminating us on matters of history, culture, philosophy, and environmentalism—but let’s face it: She was also a real badass.
Westwood radically redirected fashion through punk (dressing the Sex Pistols—no one could look at the safety pin the same way), pirates, platforms (who’d play Naomi taking a tumble?!), the monarchy, and heaving Fragonard corsetry—all while creatively sparring with partner-in-crime Malcolm McLaren (before settling into a longstanding relationship with designer Andreas Kronthaler, who now leads the Westwood label).
Just think of the dialogue! I interviewed Westwood years ago, and she came late—like two hours late (and via bicycle). She’d been dyeing her hair, her PR told me, and arrived with it freshly Titian red and wet. “Seventeenth century Venetian prostitutes used to dye their hair this color,” Westwood informed me, by way of hello. Add in the febrile backdrop of a Britain veering from the Swinging Sixties to the Swingeing Seventies to the Eighties of Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher (boo, hiss) and beyond. This would be The Crown, but with a different British queen, who also ruled.
Patrick Kelly
julio donoso/Getty Images
You might have caught one of the retrospectives of Vicksburg, Mississippi designer Patrick Kelly at the de Young Museum in San Francisco or Brooklyn Museum in the last two decades—and lucky you if you did. Kelly sadly died of AIDS in 1990 at only 35, but the tragedy of that is in stark relief to his incredible achievements, not least of which was being the first American designer to be inducted into the Chambre Syndicale. How wonderful it would be to see that, and everything else about this great designer, honored onscreen.
Kelly landed in Atlanta in the 1970s, and his design work included upcycling—at a time when that phrase meant you were likely on a bike ascending a hill—before he was discovered by uber model Pat Cleveland, who told him he should move to New York (he did, in 1979), and if that didn’t work out, he should move to Paris (he did, in 1980). That leap across the Atlantic definitely worked out, with Kelly’s career rocketing skywards as he dressed Grace Jones, Madonna, Cicely Tyson, Gloria Steinem (she spoke at his funeral) and Bette Davis (check her out wearing Kelly on Letterman in April 1989) in his colorful, exuberant clothes, which owed some debt to his Southern upbringing.
Focusing on the all-too-short life of Kelly would be a powerful reminder of a Black designer who took on the then-hierarchical and moribund institution of Paris fashion and won. He espoused an inclusive approach to who he would dress, telling People magazine, “My message is: You’re beautiful just the way you are.” His Blackness was an incontrovertible and celebratory aspect of who he was as a designer, moving critic Robin Givhan to once comment: “Kelly was African-American, and that fact played prominently in his designs, in the way he presented them to the public, and in the way he engaged his audience. No other well-known fashion designer has been so inextricably linked to both his race and his culture. And no other designer was so purposeful in exploiting both.”
Barbara Hulanicki
John Minihan/Getty Images
I will save you Googling her: Barbara Hulanicki was the founder of Biba, the groovy London boutique of the Sixties that has become legend, with the brand ending up as a department store in an impressive Art Deco building in Seventies London where you could buy not only her glammy, feathery, Thirties-esque clothing, but also make-up, homewares, and food (even baked beans!)—almost all of it in the same black-and-gold packaging. Those that shopped there and worked there were equally (well, I say shoppers, when quite a few people who waltzed through the portals of Biba were stealing the stuff, all part of a—spoiler alert—coming financial cataclysm) fierce and fabulous, including a drag queen or two.
What would be wonderful to watch now: How Hulanicki’s Biba captured both the divine decadence and the newly sexually liberated era of the early 1970s with Bowie, Bolan, and the New York Dolls—all pop cultural juggernauts at the time—as well as a post-Sixties Twiggy, whose Pre-Raphaelite hair and smoky eyes would stare out at you from Biba’s Sarah Moon-photographed ad campaigns. (Casting these folks could be sublime or nightmarish, depending on how right you thought the producers got it.)
Hulanicki herself came from an emigré background, having been born in Warsaw in 1936 before fleeing with her family for Britain, and her story kept taking on new narrative twists and turns: After Biba crashed into bankruptcy, she left for America and started designing hotels, to great acclaim, and she is still here to this day. So, a happy ending—and who doesn’t want that?
Alexander McQueen
Victor VIRGILE/Getty Images
Hmm, this is a tricky one, because it could go oh-so-horribly wrong: How could portraying the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s life ever really capture the visceral nature of his brilliance—or the punkish, fearless daring of his clothes? The first proper runway show I ever saw was a McQueen show, The Birds, in London in 1994. I got in because my boss didn’t want to go, and let me tell you it was wiiiiild: Clothes slashed, bodies Saran-Wrapped, and alien-like contact lenses, all set to a grinding, throbbing soundtrack in a venue where derelict would be a compliment. I loved it—but recreate that magic onscreen? As if.
And yet and yet: Here’s a designer who: came from a hardscrabble upbringing in east London; navigated the sometimes homophobic attitudes of Savile Row’s tailoring establishment; blagged his way into working for the then-Godlike Romeo Gigli in Milan; studied design at London’s Central Saint Martins; met the late Isabella Blow; rocked London with major theatrical shows; was hired to go to Givenchy, then onto the Gucci Group, signed on by Tom Ford; and started showing in Paris with some of the most amazing spectacles. (Remember the hologram Kate Moss?)
That’s some ten years of life, and living, right there. Tell me: Don’t you want to watch a show where, in the early days of his label, McQueen goes out clubbing with a mate after showing his latest collection earlier that day—but is forced to leave said collection hidden outside the club, never to see it again? I know I do.
Paul Poiret
Keystone-France/Getty Images
Perhaps not an obvious choice, but Poiret—the designer who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries of gilded Paris—would be a story worth watching. (It was certainly told to dazzling effect in the 2007 Costume Institute show, Poiret: King of Fashion.) Poiret shaped what a modern fashion house could be, creating through some of the most tumultuous moments of world history, living and working through both the first and second world wars.
His career went through a narrative arc as up and down as a rollercoaster—from having the world at his feet early on to his later years spent working as a street painter. (That’s not all that was dramatic: So too, by all accounts, was his love life, with beaucoup affairs in addition to his marriage to Denise Boulet.) Most of the city’s couturiers abandoned him as his star faded, though Elsa Schiaparelli stayed loyal (and paid for his funeral).
Two other reasons we’d love to see a Poiret biopic: First, just think how gorgeous the costumes would be—all that velvet and gilding and embroideries (not to mention the fact that Poiret was the progenitor of haute couture harem pants). But also because history itself serves up what would no doubt be one of the production’s most dramatic scenes: Poiret, on the descent, meets Coco Chanel, very much on her way to fashion’s stratosphere. He eyes her up as she’s dressed in all black. “Who are you in mourning for?” he smirks—to which Chanel replies: “For you, monsieur; for you.” Roll closing credits.
