There has always been a strange affinity between fashion and death. Throughout the years the fashion industry also turned into the protagonist or the set for a few thriller films involving models and murders.
The tradition, as we saw in a previous post, officially started with Mario Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964), though today I'd like to rediscover (through the vaults of Kutmusic) a Spanish classic that in some ways anticipated it - Alta Costura (1954).
Directed by Luis Marquina, and based on the eponymous novel by Darío Fernández Flórez, the film focuses on Tona, a model who goes to visit her ex-boyfriend and finds him murdered (he lives at the Residencia Fortuny - another fashion hint?). Scared she will be accused of being the killer also because she is now engaged to be married to Ramón, she runs away and goes to work.
Tona rushes to her job at the fashion house where a show to present the new collection is taking place, but her fear, anxiety and panic grow as the film progresses. The movie is actually pretty short (it's roughly 80 minutes long), and the main protagonist is definitely not Tona or the murder, but the catwalk show.
Bava fans may remember how each model was killed in a different way in Blood and Black Lace, almost to hint at different designs in a collection, but here the designs donned by the models take on a psychological meaning almost symbolising Tona's growing fears and anxieties.
While her colleagues seem to be wearing more frivolous dresses often matched with cute hats, as tension rises Tona wears a strikingly dark gown that the fictional fashion designer in the film, Amaro Lopez, calls "Drama" (image 6 in this post).
Towards the end of the film when a policeman arrives to question her, Tona is wearing a beautiful wedding gown that maybe hints at the fact that the real murder hopes to turn her from innocent into a sort of sacrificial victim.
Though the film is not extremely well acted and the mystery is more or less solved with a quick revelation about the identity of the murderer, there is a fashion bonus: all the designs featured in the catwak show were by Cristobal Balenciaga (check out the wedding dress in images 7 and 9 in this posts - it seems to anticipate Balenciaga's 1960 gown for Queen Fabiola's marriage), and this perfectly explains why all the gowns, dresses, coats and accessories look extremely beautiful, sumptuous and grave.
In some ways the film calls to mind the catwalk show in Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955), and while there are differences (Antonioni's film was taken from Cesare Pavese’s novel Tra donne sole and his movie was charged with sociological connotations), also in Antonioni's film the catwalk show is marked by sadness and anxiety as Clelia learns about Rosetta's suicide during the fashion show.
In Antonioni's film the fashion show is also a form of spectacle hinting at a sad truth: both the fashion and cinema industries try to use the female body to make money. In more or less the same way, one model tells Tona during a break that she'd better lie about seeing her ex-boyfriend's corpse as women can't tell the truth and lying is the only defence against men's tyranny and selfishness.
Trivia: the director originally wanted to shoot a thriller with an erotic edge, but the Spanish censorship prevented him from doing so and the film was reduced to a basic crime story set in the fashion world. Yet it's definitely worth rediscovering it and adding it to your "dark fashion film" section in your personal movie collection (if you can find a copy...).
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