Saturday Anti-Documentary(ies): Mode en France / In and Out of Fashion by William Klein

Let's close the Azzedine Alaïa thread that started on Thursday and continued yesterday with a brief note on a documentary that also features the designer, Mode en France (1984) by William Klein (with many thanks to Kutmusic for providing the films for the screenshots in this post).

Usually screened during events dedicated to Klein or fashion, this documentary that features Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Kenzo, agnès b., Azzedine Alaïa and Claude Montana just to mention a few of the designers involved, approaches fashion in a disenchanted way and from an unconventional point of view.

Opening with an accelerated history of women’s fashion from the early 1900s, Mode en France analyses the main theme employing different genres, from documentary and comedy to film noir and theatre.

Along the way the watcher meets a series of bizarre characters wandering around the streets entirely dressed by Gaultier, is confused by stuttering effects added to runway footage (showing the superficiality of such an event…) and spies fashion addicts feeding coins in special peepshow booths that are actually confessionals with individual models dressed in Chantal Thomass’ designs.

The part of documentary about Azzedine Alaïa focuses on theatre and features Linda Spierings and Grace Jones donning designs mainly taken from the A/W 1985-86 collection.

Given its unconventional approach, this Mode en France is actually an anti-documentary made editing together a series of fashion tableaux that show this industry as a bizarre, outlandish, false and contrived yet irresistible place.

The documentary is pretty rare, but you can see some bits and pieces featured in another Klein documentary, In and Out of Fashion (1998).

This is actually is a collage-like work analysing Klein's entire career as photographer and filmmaker.

Born in New York in 1928, Klein moved to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne with Fernand Léger. Inspired by the effects created by taking a long exposure picture of large geometrical paintings, he decided to turn to photography. He had his first break when Vogue Art Director Alexander Liberman offered him a job after seeing an exhibition of his early abstract photographs.

Klein returned therefore to New York and worked as photographer for Vogue between 1955 and 1965, shooting some of the most iconic fashion images ever published by the magazine and abiding to one rule only – focusing more on the atmosphere than on the clothes.

After returning to Paris, Klein dropped out of fashion and started directing commercials and shooting films and documentaries that became iconic from Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr Freedom (1969) and The Model Couple (1977) to Muhammad Ali: the Greatest (1969), Eldridge Cleaver: Black Panther (1970) and The Little Richard Story (1980).

While Mode en France mainly focuses on designers, In and Out of Fashion starts from the beginning of Klein's career and features quite a few extracts of his films, plus documentary photographs.

There are strong links with fashion also in this documentary: from rare footage of an Yves Saint Laurent catwalk show that inspired the Polly Maggoo film to black and white images shot backstage at the Paris couture shows (also featuring Azzedine Alaïa), plus musings on clothing conceived as cultural signifiers in street photography as stated by Roland Barthes in his Camera Lucida when describing a picture taken by Klein on Mayday 1959 in Moscow.

Though his unconventional approach and the fact that he consistently followed his instincts meant that Klein fell in and out of fashion with galleries over the years, his passion for working like an ethnographer in his pictures rather than just like an ordinary photographer meant that he managed to document from a unique perspective key decades, historical figures and the crazes and the fads of the fashion industry.