Nothing Underneath

There has been a lot of talk in the last few months about the film Picture Me, co-directed by ex-model Sara Ziff and Ole Schell. The docu-film shows the truth behind the modelling business through various interviews.

I have recently been thinking about the main topic the film tackles, trying to find a book that did the same – exposing the darkest secrets of the fashion industry – but I have realised there isn’t such a thing.

The Devil Wears Prada mania has indeed spawned sad clones in many other languages, books about frustrated women working for fashion magazines, dressing up in designer clothes and hating their colleagues and bosses.

In a way – I found myself thinking – things were maybe slightly better in the 80s.

The thriller novel Sotto il vestito niente (Nothing Underneath) written by Marco Parma was published in Italy in 1983.

The book was published under a pseudonym, some said there may have been Armani or Versace hiding behind Marco Parma, but there was actually a journalist, Paolo Pietroni, editor of Amica magazine.

The story took place in Milan just before the ready-to-wear catwalk shows for the Spring/Summer 1984 season and started with the discovery of the body of an American model in a hotel room.

A drug overdose seems to be the cause of the death, but the police's researches end up in chaos when the body mysteriously disappears from the hotel, and a fashion magazine editor called Marco Parma is apparently kidnapped by a group of terrorists.

The book features quite a few designers who hate each others, plus many journalists ready to kill for the editor's job and the author often states that the fashion industry is a corrupted world in which models are treated like prostitutes or objects.

“To people who don’t belong to the world of fashion, models may even be human beings (…) To us they are just things. Objects. They stay where you put them and don’t move. They’re just paper dolls,” Mario Pozzo, a fashion publisher, tells the police inspector in the novel, “They have a child's mind and if you undress them hoping to find the body of a woman, what do you find? Nothing. Nothing underneath. They are just empty things, the opposite of what you dreamt for or hoped you may have found (…) They are superficial. They are just ephemeral.”

In the novel the Italian fashion industry turns into an excuse to cover up drug trafficking and though the plot is slightly convoluted, at times surreal or just a little bit silly, the book manages to describe rather well the excess of the Italian fashion industry in the 80s, when ready to-wear was a money-making machine.

The war between fictional designers Salvatore Vassalli and Luca Zarbonni calls to mind the rivalry between some Italian designs such as Versace and Armani while the Japanese fishskin designs Vassalli comes up with remind a lot of the experiments many designers made with unusual materials in the 80s (and in particular Versace’s own experiments with animal skins…).

I often mentioned in a few previous posts Antonioni’s films in connection with fashion.

Antonioni had a sort of fascination with the world of fashion: in 1949 he shot in a factory in Torviscosa, near Trieste, the documentary Sette canne, un vestito (Seven Reeds, One Suit), about the production of rayon, one of the “autarchic fabric” created during the fascist regime.

Among the documentaries Antonioni would have liked to shoot in these years but never managed to for financial reasons, there was also Modelle, a short film aimed at chronicling the lifestyle of Italian models in the Fifties.

In 1984, Antonioni accepted to shoot a crime story taken from Marco Parma’s Sotto il vestito niente. It wasn’t the plot that fascinated Antonioni, but the chance that the film would have given him to get to know better the world of fashion and the Milan-based designers who in the mid-‘80s had become style gurus.

Charlotte Rampling and Terence Stamp were chosen as lead actors, Versace was among the designers who had to contribute to the film with his creations. Regrettably, Antonioni never shot the film as its Italian producer withdrew at the last minute.

Yet as power dressing exploded in the ‘80s and Milan turned into the Italian fashion capital with young designers such as Armani, Versace and Ferrè charming critics worldwide, director Carlo Vanzina shot a sort of scarier adaptation of Parma's book.

Though critics didn’t like it, Vanzina's Sotto il
vestito niente (Nothing Underneath, 1985) managed to combine rather successfully the main elements of the thriller genre with the world of fashion.

Among the highlights of this film there are Danish top model Renée Simonsen starring as Barbara and a Moschino catwalk staged around Milan Central Station.

A follow-up was provided by Dario Piana’s mediocre Sotto il vestito niente 2 (Too Beautiful to Die, 1988), in which the rape and death of model Sylvia starts the usual killing spree.

I would love to see an intelligent novel about fashion being published. I admit that I wouldn’t mind a thriller, but I think it would be really refreshing if, rather than featuring a frustrated woman working for an important fashion magazine, such book would take the piss out of the fashion industry (real designs, pretentious journalists, high profile bloggers and overprotective PR agents included).

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