The words "fashion film" usually conjure up in our minds glamorous movies featuring striking or fantastically inventive costume designs donned by iconic actresses.
Yet a fictional film about fashion may be approached also from the point of view of the textile industry, without turning into a boring documentary.
A good example remains the satirical comedy "The Man in the White Suit", a 1951 film directed by Alexander Mackendrick, based on a play by Roger MacDougall and with costumes by Anthony Mendleson (who started working as a painter and set designer for the stage, but joined Ealing Studios as a costume designer and wardrobe supervisor in 1947, moving in the '50s to Pinewood Studios).
The story revolves around young eccentric researcher and former Cambridge scholarship recipient, chemist Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness).
Stratton is working in the laboratory of a mill and secretely trying to develop an innovative everlasting artificial fiber.
Unfortunately his researches are rather expensive and clumsy as well and after he is discovered he gets fired.
Stratton finds another job at the Birnley Mill and becomes an unpaid researcher there, even though he gets given the funds and space needed for his quite often comically explosive experiments that seem to become more and more dangerous.
The researcher eventually succeeds and creates a miraculous fabric that resists wear, tear and stains, but success will prove more elusive than the revolutionary fiber.
Soon Stratton realises indeed that both the wealthy mill magnates and the oppressed garment workers may not be too happy about his discovery.
The new fiber may indeed have catastrophic consequences, driving the mills on the brink of ruin and leaving the workers jobless, causing a huge crisis in the textile industry and its final collapse.
The conclusion will be surprising for all involved, but disappointing for Stratton, who will anyway not lose his heart in his crazy researches.
The film has a scientific side with Stratton always working in his laboratory, quite often staring at the strange contraption on his table in which boils a mysterious whitish concoction.
The contraption makes rather comically strange and mesmerising noises: they were dubbed the "Guggle Glub Guggle" effects and created by uncredited sound editor Mary Habberfield (and produced by a tuba and a bassoon). The effects were then sampled by Jack Parnell on the record "The White Suit Samba" (released on Parlophone) and composed by Parnell and T.E.B. Clarke).
There are other comical aspects in the film, especially the scenes in which Stratton's continuous explosions caused by his experiments keep on shaking the mill, temporarily turning it into a war zone, or the very end of the film with the chemist running through the streets at night in his glowing white suit (the garment is sightly luminous since it contains a radioactive substance as well…), pursued by the mill owners and the workers.
Fashion and textile-wise the most interesting aspects are the manufacturing scenes with Stratton overlooking the production of the fabric from thread to textile. The researcher then gets a bespoke suit made with the fabric: being super resistant, the tailor provides the pattern to Stratton who cuts it with an oxyhydrogen flame.
What makes the film – hailed by the British Film Institute as the 58th greatest British film of all time – rather interesting for our days is that so far there hasn't been another story shot about an imaginary super fiber or super fabric and maybe it would be about time to rediscover the potential of such a plot.
You can bet, though, that in case the tale of Sidney Stratton was shot once again in a modern key (and in this case it would have intriguing subplots about the environment and pollution…), the reactions of the textile factory owners and of the workers would be exactly the same.
Yet again it would be worth seeing a reboot of the film, maybe adding more protagonists such as fashion retailers and famous fashion designers who would go crazy as an eternal fabric would kill their businesses. Somehow you know it would have great potential and it would offer the possibility of a lot of rather comical scenes.
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