What is it about the fashion industry that makes the people working in it feel they have a right to act so self-superior? So gatekeeper-esque. What are they guarding? They keys to someone else’s ability to help destroy the environment? The illusion that the emperor is wearing new clothes as opposed to no clothes? Perhaps a combination of both. But the bottom line is that, in film form, the “fashion people” get off on fortifying the reputation that surrounds their cuntery. As though it’s a badge of honor, meant to be worn as a source of pride. And even Ye has contributed to that more than ever for all his attempts to be “man of the people”-esque by selling a line of his clothing brand, Yeezy, at the Gap… inspired by homeless people. Because only in the fashion world could “appropriating poverty” be marketed as something “chic.” Like Jo’s (Audrey Hepburn) “intellectualism” in Funny Face. With Jo herself rightly deriding the fashion business as “an unrealistic approach to self-impressions as well as economics.”
Regardless, the fashion industry relishes billing itself as “innovative” and “avant-garde” above all else. Yet, in the end, it always shows its true colors as stodgy and old guard-oriented. Never wanting to rock the boat too much lest it should tamper with profit margins or, worse still, attract the “wrong element.” As Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris recently reminded, this has been going on since “the dawn of haute couture.” Which can arguably be pinpointed back, in its modern iteration, to Christian Dior. Sure, Charles Frederick Worth might have been the first to establish a “Couture House,” but even long before then, elitism in clothing was apparent in the epoch of Marie Antoinette, who had a “fashion minister” named Rose Bertin.
Thus, from the moment it became a viable option to be profligate with “levels” of clothing that could set a person apart, one could posit that the classes were doomed to feel an even more palpable divide, with the “peasants” of this world relegated to what the rich will always see as rags (including Miranda Priestly [Meryl Streep] viewing “trickle-down” cerulean as such). And even when a “poor” person does come up with the money to buy a highly expensive garment, the “gatekeepers” pull the shopgirl-in-Pretty Woman maneuver by saying, with just one judgmental look, “I don’t think we have anything for you. You’re obviously in the wrong place. Please leave.” The fact that Vivian (Julia Roberts) is told this in actuality is emblematic of how the fashion cunts of the world get off on knowing that clothing plays into the perception of class. And because Vivian looks like the “trashy whore” she is, they “know better” than to believe she has “money to spend in here,” as she so defiantly declares. But they don’t want her money, no. They want the money of someone “legitimately” rich. The same goes for Mrs. Harris (Lesley Manville) when she first walks into Dior with the required cash amount for a custom gown.
Sizing her up with disgust, Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), the director of the fashion house, urges her to leave, just as the Beverly Hills bitches did to Vivian. But because the House of Dior’s accountant, André Fauvel (Lucas Bravo), is only too aware that they’re going bankrupt thanks to all their “rich” customers operating on credit instead of liquid cash, he advocates for Mrs. Harris to stay. So does a regular patron, Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), who invites her to be his accompanying guest at the tenth anniversary fashion show (which Mrs. Harris just so happens to have stumbled upon). With the favor of “legitimate” (defined as “moneyed”) people on her side, Mrs. Harris is allowed a glimpse into the world that she has been kept out of, or rather, only permitted to exist “on the periphery” of. Not just because she doesn’t dress “the right way,” but because her very class among the charwomen will never be shaken from her “aura” in the eyes of the rich. No matter how effectively she “plays dress-up.”
Not being able to afford the lush, sumptuous fabrics of the rich has ended up costing more to many a broke-ass (read: middle-class person) before Mrs. Harris, including the widows of the nineteenth century who wore the shitty mourning veils made out of chemicals and dyes that often ended up killing the widows themselves. But when fashion became such a viable economic force as it “expanded” to the “lesser” (a.k.a. not as rich) folks of the world, there was no denying that it oughtn’t be reserved solely for the wealthy as a means of “expression” (as long as it could be done at a cheaper cost to mass produce—enter a product like the aforementioned mourning veil). This is where the entire narrative of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris comes in. With Mrs. Harris being one of those “down-at-heel” types (that means someone who wasn’t born into money) who can only “dream” of owning something as beautiful as a Dior gown—which she first clocks in the closet of one of the do-nothing women she cleans for—she decides that she’s tired of merely dreaming. That she wants to make that dream real. For another thing that fashion cunts like to congratulate themselves on is being the subject of movies that advocate for “inclusivity.” Even though that’s never what it’s really about—everything truly boiling down to how many more people can be sold to, therefore profits made.
Nonetheless, the fashion cunts love to perpetuate the myth that an article of clothing can change the way you feel, therefore change your entire life. The statement underlying that being: perception is everything, and if people perceive you to be well-dressed/affluent, you’ll go much further (at least in the public space, as Vivian revealed in Pretty Woman). Dress for the part you want to play, like Sue Ellen (Christina Applegate) in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. And granted, clothing does play its own part in how a person is viewed, but it doesn’t mean that it can ultimately change the way a person is treated. Always being “seen through” when they find themselves surrounded by the “genuine” “upper echelons.” To use Ye’s words after terminating the Yeezy deal with Gap, “I’m not gonna argue with people who are broker than me about money.” Though that would never be an issue considering how rich people insulate themselves from hearing (or seeing) anything that doesn’t suit their worldview.
Even so, screenwriters Carroll Cartwright, Anthony Fabian, Keith Thompson and Olivia Hetreed want their audience to somehow feel that they’re offering a “forward-thinking” insight by assuring that the little people deserve “something special” too. Even Isabelle Huppert sounds condescending when describing the core of the film’s message as being “about how certain wishes, certain dreams, shouldn’t be reserved only for a few people but for everybody.” Gee, thanks for the sanction. Huppert also added, “At some point, you see Mrs. Harris understand that she should bring democracy to this world of royalty.” But, as mentioned, the fashion cunts never give in to “democracy” because they’ve stopped being exclusionary; they do it because it means they can cadge some more nickels and dimes off the “riffraff” for their coffers.
And so, although the fashion industry might delight in having an entire movie genre so frequently devoted to it (including, of course, the ultimate in exclusionary fashion bitchery: The Devil Wears Prada), with Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris being among the most recent additions, it might want to take stock of how the overarching theme in every single film is what assholes the people who comprise it are. And how clothing is just another way to cause divides between the classes that are already so divided as it is without the absurdity of mere “threads” causing an even more pronounced schism. Plus, as RuPaul once said, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag.” “The rest” being a fantastical ruse, a farce in this thing called capitalistic life.
