THERE ARE ONLY TWO kinds of women in the world of clothing. One buys her clothes made-to-order, the other buys her clothes ready-made. The made-to-order lady frequents Molyneux, Lanvin, Paquin, Chanel, in Paris. In New York she is deposited by her chauffeur ‘on the Plaza,’ at the door of Bergdorf Goodman, or she threads through the traffic of Forty-ninth Street to Hattie Carnegie, less advantageously placed geographically but equally important where fashion is concerned. She may do her shopping out of the traffic, in a grey house on Sixty-seventh Street, Hawes, Inc., or just hit the edge of the mob at the Savoy-Plaza where Valentina holds sway.

In any case, the made-to-order lady can shop and dress to her entire satisfaction. Thousands of skilled craftsmen and women are ready to sew up her clothes. Tens of designers in London and Paris and New York and Los Angeles will work out her special sketches. Hundreds of salespeople are on tap at all hours of the day to watch over her fittings, advise her what not to buy, send shoppers to find that special colour and material which really should be worn in her dining room.

She pays, yes. But it’s worth it a thousand times. Her clothes are her own and correspond to her life as she understands it. She may spend hours fitting them, but in the end they are right.

Meanwhile, the ready-made lady shops. She too may want a special colour to wear in her dining room. She may find that colour after two weeks of hunting, or she may never find it, since very possibly ‘we are not using it this season.’ She may find a really warm and sturdy winter coat which will last her for the next six years and only cost $35 or she may discover that the coat she bought last year is not in fashion this year, that the material was, after all, not all wool.

Millions and millions of women go shopping year after year. They are tall and short, fat and thin, gay and depressed. They may clothe their bodies for the simple purpose of keeping warm or not going naked. They may choose their wardrobes with care for wintering in Palm Beach, or going to the races in Ascot. Their first necessary choice is, can they pay enough to get exactly what they want or are they at the mercy of mass production. Can they buy style or must they buy fashion?

Lanvin and Chanel, Hawes and Valentina, are fundamentally occupied with selling style. The manufacturer and the department store are primarily occupied with selling fashion.

I don’t know when the word fashion came into being, but it was an evil day. For thousands of years people got along with something called style and maybe, in another thousand, we’ll go back to it.

Style is that thing which, being looked back upon after a century, gives you the fundamental feeling of a certain period in history. Style in Greece in 2000 B.C. was delicate outdoor architecture and the clothes which went with it. Style in the Renaissance was an elaborately carved stone cathedral and rich velvet, gold trimmed robes. Style doesn’t change every month or every year. It only changes as often as there is a real change in the point of view and lives of the people for whom it is produced.

Style in 1937 may give you a functional house and comfortable clothes to wear in it. Style doesn’t give a whoop whether your comfortable clothes are red or yellow or blue, or whether your bag matches your shoes. Style gives you shorts for tennis because they are practical. Style takes away the wasp-waisted corset when women get free and active.

If you are in a position to deal with a shop which makes your clothes specially for you, style is what you can have, the right clothes for your life in your epoch, uncompromisingly, at once.

On top of style there has arisen a strange and wonderful creature called fashion. He got started at least as far back as the seventeenth century when a few smart people recognised him for what he was and is. ‘See’st thou not, I say, what a deformed thief this fashion is?’ Mr. Shakespeare demanded in Much Ado About Nothing. But nobody paid any attention.

Now we have the advertising agency and the manufacturer, the department store and the fashion writer all here to tell us that the past, present, and future of clothing depends on fashion, ceaselessly changing.

Manufacturing clothes is the second largest business in the United States. Not one-half of one percent of the population can have its clothing made to order or wants to for that matter.

This means that a large portion of $2,656,242,000 changes hands annually under the eye of that thief, fashion, who becomes more and more deformed with practice. Fashion is a parasite on style. Without style, he wouldn’t exist, but what he does to it is nobody’s business.

Fashion is that horrid little man with an evil eye who tells you that your last winter’s coat may be in perfect physical condition, but you can’t wear it. You can’t wear it because it has a belt and this year ‘we are not showing belts.’

Fashion gets up those perfectly ghastly ideas, such as accessories should match, and proceeds to give you shoes, gloves, bag, and hat all in the same hideous shade of kelly green which he insists is chic this season whether it turns you yellow or not. Fashion is apt to insist one year that you are nobody if you wear flat heels, and then turn right around and throw thousands of them in your face.

Fashion persuades millions of women that comfort and good lines are not all they should ask in clothes. Fashion swings the female population this way and that through the magic expression that ‘they’ are wearing such and such this season and you must do likewise or be ostracised.

Fashion in America says that if Lady Abbington is wearing lace to the races, you should wear it to work in Macy’s basement because you are afterwards going on to Coney Island. If ‘they’ are wearing their hair cut close to their heads and waved over one eye, then you must, too. If you can’t go to the hairdresser every day, that’s just too bad.

One of the most fascinating things about the world of fashion is that practically no one knows who inhabits it or why it exists. There are a few people who know how it works, but they won’t tell. So it just goes on, getting in deeper and deeper, until something like a war or depression slows it up from time to time. But once the war or the depression lets up, off again goes fashion on its mad way.

Some people seem to like it. There are a good many people who don’t, but just accept it as inevitable, throwing away perfectly good old clothes and buying new ones every year. Now and then the public gets angry and writes letters to the press saying they simply won’t wear long skirts, or short ones, as the case may be, but ‘they’ pay very little attention. ‘They’ just go ahead and change the fashion again and say you can’t have blue or you must have brown.

‘They’ decide everything. ‘They’ know whether it is to be pink or green this fall, whether it’s to be short skirts, whether you can wear mink. For years everyone who thinks has gone around at one time or another trying to find out in a desultory sort of way who ‘they’ are.

If they have any sense of humour, they must have a great deal of fun. Fancy how they must have laughed when they once got the last New York shop girl into afternoon clothes in the morning. One of their best stunts was putting all the ladies into Eugenie hats one September, and then whipping them off when all those old feathers had been sold.

In the past they were able to decree that all Fifth Avenue was to be purple in a given week. If you didn’t get a purple dress in those days, you were jailed. They got by so well with the colour changes that a revulsion occurred in the public mind, and for a number of years they haven’t really succeeded in putting across a solid wave of a single colour.

They take inordinate pleasure in telling you your accessories must match and then putting out seven different shades of brown so you can spend two weeks finding the brown shoe that happens to go with your brown coat. They also love to take up ‘influences.’ Sometimes it’s Chinese, other times Mexican. The game those seasons is to try and find the influence in anything but print.

Then, they improve things. The sight of a simple towelling bathrobe infuriates them. They put navy blue stars on it at once. Just as you resign yourself to the navy blue stars, they throw away that pattern and make all the towelling bathrobes with puffed sleeves.

The same group took away all those lovely white bathrooms and made them lavender, and have got out streamline gas stoves. They no sooner taught everyone to go out in low shoes and silk stockings in winter than they decided to try out high shoes again.

There have been rumours about that ‘they’ are people like Greta Garbo, and Mrs. Harrison Williams, exotic theatrical stars and rich society ladies. But nobody can prove it. Greta Garbo is reported to wear whatever her designer chooses to put on her and it is exceedingly doubtful that she really expected everyone to wear sequin day dresses a la Mata Hari.

Mrs. Harrison Williams always appears to be having a very good time in public and to be largely taken up with talking to her dinner partner. Possibly she lies awake nights worrying whether to turn all the world into a chiffon evening dress or thinking up the newest colour for next spring.

Are ‘they’ really the French designers? At a large meeting of New York business women in fashion, Lucien Lelong was answering questions. ‘Monsieur Lelong,’ a lady begged, ‘please tell us what colours will be smart next spring?’ Monsieur Lelong politely replied, ‘I have a hundred shades of blue, a hundred shades of red, and so on. When I design a new collection, I just put my hand on the samples and take anyone that suits my fancy that day.’

Patou, when he was alive and successful around 1932, got out a whole collection of long-waisted dresses. Nobody else followed suit. Nobody bought them. He had to make another collection with natural waists.

There are the dress manufacturers on our Seventh Avenue in New York. Some say they are they.’ Some say those manufacturers just brutally decide they will put the waist-lines up or down as suits their fancy. How did it happen then, in 1930, that the manufacturers on Seventh Avenue made a whole set of clothes with short skirts and suddenly found the skirts had got long while they weren’t looking?

So, a king gets crowned in England and everything must have ermine trimming. But you can’t find any ermine trimming in America that spring. I go to buy some oxfords with Cuban heels and find that they only come with one-inch heels. In 1929 leather-heeled oxfords were too heavy for any American woman to wear. That’s what Delman’s chic shoe shop said. By 1934, leather-heeled oxfords were all over the streets of New York.

I want a navy blue dress in the fall. It is only worn in the spring, the salesgirl says. I want a coat with no fur trimming in the winter of 1930. All winter coats have fur trimming, the salesgirl says.

I want a brown turtle-necked sweater. I start at Macy’s and slowly wend my way through Altman’s and Best’s and Lord and Taylor’s and Saks’ and Bonwit’s. Finally I buy a white one at Fortnum and Mason and send it to be dyed. They say it won’t dye, but it does.

I want a plain knit bathing suit with a skirt. They’re all fancy knits this year and they have no skirts. I want a brassiere and separate pants bathing suit. We don’t have them any more. That was last year.

I want that kind of a bathing suit and I’m going right up and get one made to order by Valentina. I don’t care if it does cost me $200. But if I haven’t got the $200, must I take a printed challis bathing suit this year and like it? Just because they’re wearing them on the Lido, what’s that to me?

Why don’t they ask me, a ready-made lady, what I want? Maybe they’d find out, to their horror, that all I want is a nice deep-crowned riding hat like the one I had ten years ago. Why don’t they find out how much money I have to spend and what I really want to buy for it? Who got up this idea that just because one tenth of one percent of the population needs a certain kind of clothes, I want the same thing? Who decided that just because I was only paying $10.75 for my dress I wanted a bow and a diamond clip added to the neck?

Fashion, my girl, he decided. He doesn’t deal directly with you. He swipes ideas from style, embroiders them to cover up the fact that he left out half the material and only paid 75 cents a yard for the rest. He hires press agents and advertising men to assure you that the bright cellophane wrapper is what counts. Fashion gets $50,000 a year for convincing you. His wife gets her clothes at Hattie Carnegie’s, so why should he worry.

I, Elizabeth Hawes, have sold, stolen, and designed clothes in Paris. I have reported on Paris fashions for newspapers and magazines and department stores. I’ve worked with American buyers in Europe.

In America, I have built up my ivory tower on Sixty-seventh Street in New York. There I enjoy the privilege of making beautiful and expensive clothes to order for those who can afford my wares. I ran the show myself from the business angle for its first four years. I have designed, sold, and publicised my own clothes for nine years.

At the same time, in New York, I designed one year for a cheap wholesale dress house. I’ve designed bags, gloves, sweaters, hats, furs, and fabrics for manufacturers. I’ve worked on promotions of those articles with advertising agencies and department stores.

During the course of all this, I’ve become convinced that ninety-five percent of the business of fashion is a useless waste of time and energy as far as the public is concerned. It serves only to ball up the ready-made customers and make their lives miserable. The only useful purpose that changes in fashion can possibly have is to give a little additional gaiety to life. But by the time you’ve taken off fashion’s bright cellophane wrapper, you usually find not only that fashion is no fun at all, but that even the utility of your purchase has been sacrificed.

Fashion is so shrouded in mystery, so far away and so foreign, so complicated, and so boring when you understand its ways, that it has become a complete anachronism in modern life. One good laugh, and the deformed thief would vanish into the past.

Elizabeth Hawes was an American fashion designer, writer, and critic. This excerpt was originally published in her 1937 book, Fashion is Spinach, a memoir.

This is trip four out of the twelve markets I will go on this year. Twenty-seven flights. Outside the taxi, the air in Milan is thick and wet so we fold our sheaths of coats, scarves, and bags in order to make a graceful exit. Market is better known as Fashion Week. The online videos and Instagram stories overlook the commercial aspect of what resembles a parade of glamorous product sponsorships and celebrities. Independently of that fanfare (wherever it is) we do our jobs. We are the worker ants bringing the microscopic morsels of food back to the colony. Clothing Accountants. Buyers. We are, more specifically, buyers for a high volume e-commerce luxury retailer. Or actually, I am the buyer’s assistant. This means most things are said to me in this tone:

‘Don’t put my face in it.’

I lower the iPad. Before me my boss Aimee is staring at me intently, thrusting forward a hanger bearing a pair of chartreuse green track-pants with the words ‘Amour’ and ‘Boss’ embroidered in sequins across the knees. We have been taking notes and photos for three-and-a-half hours. The room is quartered by clothing racks, packed tightly by colour story, standing perpendicular to a wall of windows that overlook an overgrown field. It would be a less oppressive space if the walls were not black and the ceiling not so low. We are falling behind, especially because the salesperson we are working with has lost all motivation to help us. She is wearing a showroom uniform: a bottle green cardigan, tired white shirt and bouncy lavalliere bow around her neck. The deliberate sweetness of her uniform throws her bad mood into sharp relief. She keeps asking us if we want more coffee and running to the bathroom. She must not be on commission.

‘Is my face in it?’ Aimee asks. I look at the iPad, and see her scowl pop out just above the drawstring.

‘A little. Just the mouth,’ I reply.

‘That’s Look Five,’ she barks. ‘Write it down or we’ll forget… write it on the iPad.’

She’s at a loss for words and gesticulating. This is how we spend our days. Luxury clothing is sold in showrooms, to buyers coming from various stores, who sell it to customers. It’s a Russian nesting doll situation and it can be hard to tell who should be pandering to whom, though, somehow, I always end up feeling it should be me. This salesperson surely agrees since she is correcting all my colour names as I read the descriptions back to Aimee. It’s not bright blue, it’s ‘Turbo.’ It’s not pink, it’s ‘Arousal.’ Arousal is iconic, and they would prefer if we used that expression. Massimo would really prefer that. She gets flustered and runs off.

‘That girl has no sense of urgency,’ Aimee says disapprovingly.

The salesperson re-approaches, grinning widely, dangling a T-shirt with a phallic motif on it. Now we are excited.

‘That’s free money!’ is Aimee’s favourite expression, and she uses it here. It means something we can go deep and wide into. ‘Deep’ means we will buy a lot in quantity, and ‘wide’ means we will buy a lot of colours. For a long time we consider colours for the phallus, and which direction it should point. (Sideways is chic, up or down is crass.)

‘Can we have an exclusive colour?’ I ask. Aimee is pleased, and she gives me a praising look. The salesperson says we have to ask Massimo, but probably the minimum order would be quite deep and they would expect a marketing push from our end. Aimee reminds her that last time we received an ‘exclusive’ it turned up on Farfetch in several different stores, so we would rather they did the marketing push themselves this time. We talk about background colours, while I pull up our most recent sales report by colour. As with the last twenty exclusives, we choose bright pink. It is, after all, what the colour report says we should do. Recent research showed that most orders placed on our site were sent to large, new condo developments in rural areas in the U.S. We think of our customer as an urban creative: an architect or graphic designer for an up-and-coming firm in London or New York. The shared aspiration seems to be beneficial for both us and our real customer: the wealthy suburbanite.

The salesperson steps away to make a phone call and Aimee tells me that this brand is shit. She can’t wait to get out of here and on to the next appointment. She rolls her eyes. I have a flash memory of reading somewhere that brands were supposed to be ‘spaces for dreams.’

We make small-talk with the vendor’s manager, whose Airbnb host is refusing to deliver more toilet paper. Aimee makes sure to hit all the important points: budget, delivery windows, order deadline. She goes to the bathroom and I let the manager know we will not be meeting the deadline. She comes back from the bathroom much more energetic and they use hot words with one another while I finish typing maniacally. Hot words are indoctrinated during branding meetings and they indicate you belong here. We use them much like a mating-call. So Aimee makes sure to say ‘Disrupt,’ ‘SEO’ and ‘We really aren’t calling it a store, it’s more of a creation space’ to the manager, to which she replies, ‘Sustainable’ ‘Emotional pieces’ and ‘Our girl is really growing up with this collection, she’s just becoming so much more sophisticated (not old) and we want to really be responsive to that,’ and then we leave.

In the Uber Aimee texts our manager excitedly about all the free money.

I wanted to be a buyer because it sounded powerful: it indicated both ownership and curation. In reality most of my time is spent retyping product descriptions (‘yellow perfecto in stretch sugared lambskin with tonal top-stitching’) and lending a vague opinion about chic dick colours, carefully avoiding any strong statements. Instead of power what I have is ‘accountability.’ Accountability for the personal taste of strangers. Aimee would say it is the reverse: we only buy what the customer wants, so they are the accountable ones. I suppose we are co-conspirators. Aimee looks up from her phone, seemingly stunned.

‘Do you remember the tiny woman who was stealing everything off our rack at Wang?

With the short hair and the velvet pants? French?’

‘Yes.’

‘She died! She collapsed and died after a showroom appointment! In the bathroom!’

‘No she didn’t…’

I know this will weigh heavily on Aimee, who is a kind soul despite it all. The rumour lingers briefly for me, and I return to my thoughts. I’m thinking about the sleep I will have in a few hours. The other assistant researched that you can get a full REM cycle in ninety minutes and then handed me a large Dexedrine for when I wake up. According to him it’s what they do in the military, although that seems far-fetched.

‘We need to bid higher on Acne Studios on Google AdWords. When I searched it this morning we were the second option after Net-a-Porter.’ I blurt out, having suddenly remembered.

‘So e-mail Paul – he can place a larger bid when he gets into the office.’ Paul’s official title is ‘SEO (‘Search Engine Optimization’) Scrum-master.’ It’s a rugby analogy, meaning he is the organizer of our on-going battle for online presence. I send him a curt e-mail, resentful that I had to call it out.

As we approach the snake-encrusted door to our next appointment at Gucci, Aimee pulls me aside. A gaggle of other buyers who are changing from sneakers to heels with their hands on the brick wall are watching us.

‘I want to talk to you about the last Gucci appointment we had. I was really surprised that you undermined my selection to Sara when she asked you.’ I am caught off-guard by the public shaming and start babbling apologies. Aimee stares at her phone and says we’re late, we have to go in. I am still blushing when the girl from the front desk greets us and sits us at our table in the enormous velvet-upholstered red room. Even the walls and carpet are red velvet: it’s like being inside of an organ. I remember that we will likely be here for nine hours and feel nauseous. There are no windows, just dozens of racks of sparkly and lacey clothing lining the walls in schizophrenic colour stories. Aimee is trying to hand a cough-drop to a passing teenage fit model wearing a green lace full-length gown with an ivory bodice. The fit model, likely an Eastern European, refuses politely. Aimee says we have to make sure that we don’t see any clothes on that girl, since everything will look good on her, and it will throw us off.

While we wait for a salesperson, I pull out the iPad and we go over the analysis on a PDF sent by the merchandisers. What colours and silhouettes do we need?  She counts how many colours and fabrics we need to buy in the Dionysus bag, and notes with relief that price-point is not a determining factor in the bags department. However, we need to stop selecting so many colours of the Kangaroo-lined Princetown loafer. That silhouette is slowing down across the board.

Besides this glorified shopping list, we prepare by asking ourselves what the brand is going to accuse us of. Aimee asks me to pull up the report on off-brand styling to see if we are guilty with Gucci. (It is my favourite report as it compiles our worst online looks into a kind of photo blooper reel, with commentary from our manager to the stylists such as ‘STOP STYLING DRIES TROUSERS WITH LOUBOUTIN HEELS,’ ‘VETEMENTS SWEATSHIRTS ARE NOT DRESSES,’ ‘WHERE ARE HER PANTS?!’)

‘Wait no, I saw that this morning – show me the relevancy figures so I have them fresh in my mind.’ She gasps at the figure: only twelve percent above average likes on our Instagram for this season. Gucci has dropped several points within the brand relevancy matrix since I checked yesterday.

‘Ugh. Does that mean it’s going to become another markdown brand soon?’ Aimee asks herself. ‘I can’t deal with another one.’ We don’t control the Instagram. We recently hired an underground magazine from Copenhagen to run the social media content and make it look like we know things about music and culture. I heard they don’t print the magazine anymore, and instead work as a content factory for several brands. I liked the last presentation the editor gave when he said that our focus was now going to be on the daily life of the ‘Cool Everyman,’ giving up the polished ‘unnatural’ editorials of the past. We will, of course, continue to style the models in luxury clothing, only now they will be doing what is ‘natural’ to them: skate-boarding and participating in art installations in Miami.

I am hit with a wave of exhaustion as I stare at the massive wall of meticulously organized Dionysus bags. In the corner of my eye I can see our salesperson, Amanda, coming towards us with aggressive friendliness. My heart is palpitating off-rhythm again. How do we pull off these racks and shelves the two hundred styles that will appeal to the maximum number of affluent people for the maximum number of reasons?

How deep can we go into this collective space for dreams?   

Later, back at the hotel after an awkward and rushed dinner with a supplier, I take out the bottle of German energy drink I have stashed in the mini-bar. Everything still has a green fog over it, which is what happens when your eyes adjust to bright red for ten hours. After weighing entering orders against my ninety minutes of sleep, I decide to delay gratification and return to my laptop. Aimee is texting me from her room asking what orders are ready for her to review, and telling me that I should prioritize Versace. The order entry begins.

‘Large Black Prometheus Backpack in Varnished Goatskin.’ Style code. Colour code.

‘Medusa Head Necklace in Plated Stainless Steel.’ Style code. Colour code. ‘Medusa ring.’ ‘Medusa Bracelet.’ What is it with Italian brands and Greek mythology? My head crashes into my keyboard while typing up the list of Versace Medusa jewellery. I get up and pour the viscous yellow liquid into a plastic cup to continue my night of describing. Tomorrow, the order will get quantified. The next day it will get approved by the merchandisers. The day after it will get approved by the editors, who may suggest to add a runway piece. Then it will get sent to the brand who will ensure that we represented them well. Finally, the product will get made somewhere very far from where we go on market, and our customer will like it on Instagram having seen it on the Cool Everyman, and will buy it on sale at the end of the season.

As I get the kick from the Club-Mate, I remember reading about a parasite that moves through a remarkable number of hosts: a worm, a blade of grass, a bird, a cat, and its final host is a human person, transmitted while they pet their cat. The writer was impressed by the parasite’s amazing purposeful journey, in spite of having no consciousness. I’m still thinking about the parasite when Aimee texts me again to ask if the order is ready yet.

Lily Smith is the pen name of an assistant buyer based in New York. She has worked in the lower echelons of mass luxury retail for seven years.

All Wiseman films are odd. Stubbornly original. Iconoclastic. (‘Near Death‘ is six hours long.) Without music, narration, or staged interviews, they force the viewer to constantly interpret their meanings. Sometimes it’s a struggle. ‘Model‘, for example, contains an extremely long and detailed sequence about the filming of an Evan Picone commercial. Novelist William T. Vollmann writes of this scene: ‘That model descending the steps excites my pity when I see her being made to do it over and over again. Life, so I want to think, should not be like that. It should be “spontaneous.” Or should it?’ Here Vollmann bursts out in exasperation, ‘What does Wiseman want me to learn?’¹

But it’s worth the effort. Though there has been a string of critically praised fashion documentaries recently (‘Valentino: The Last Emperor‘; ‘Bill Cunningham New York‘), nothing quite like ‘Model‘ exists. A comparison to ‘The September Issue‘, a highly regarded fashion documentary, brings Wiseman’s work sharply into focus: The film featured a human protagonist (Anna Wintour), an antagonist (Grace Coddington), within a conventional narrative arc. Wiseman films have none of these. In ‘The Store‘, we are instead confronted with a Rorschach ink blot – seemingly mundane images of shoppers sifting through merchandise, a sales associate’s awkward birthday celebration, and merchandising strategy meetings (‘We’re in Neiman Marcus for one reason and one reason only – and that’s to make sales,’ one VP remarks, unwittingly providing the key to the film). The protagonist of ‘The Store‘ is the store itself, carefully observed in a document that is deeply meditative, absorbing and mesmerising.

Wiseman’s films prior to ‘Model’ had stark subjects: welfare recipients, insane asylum inmates – yet when I spoke to him, Wiseman told me his fashion films weren’t necessarily a thematic departure: ‘I am trying to make films about as many different aspects of contemporary life as I can. Documentary film does not have to be restricted to films about poor or exploited people.’ Furthermore, the editing process is a crucial aspect of Wiseman’s work, since his documentary style is so unobtrusive, filming for long periods of time observing his subjects, I was interested to know if any sequences in ‘Model‘ and ‘The Store‘ surprised in this process, emerging as more significant than he’d realised during filming. He explained further, that ‘It is all a surprise since I know very little about the subject before I begin shooting. The idea is that the film should at least in part show what I learned as a consequence of the shoot and the long period of editing.’

Both films have been interpreted as Marxist critiques. Author Dan Armstrong, for example, argues that ‘Model‘ ‘examine[s] contemporary American class struggle from the perspective of the ideological and cultural hegemony of the Professional Managerial Class over the subordinate working class.’² Yet if Wiseman held any particular animus toward fashion, his description of how he selected his quarry sounds blameless, almost random: ‘I did not make a list of all the possibilities in the fashion world. The idea of a model agency appealed to me. I contacted Zoli and he agreed. I knew something of Neiman Marcus’s reputation and thought it would be a good choice.’ Likewise, the decision to shoot ‘The Store‘ in colour (all the previous films were made in black and white) was practical, not strategic: ‘I thought it was important to show the colour of the products sold. Also, the quality of the picture is better in colour when you are shooting in low light.’

Wiseman’s mandarin responses remind us of his mandarin films. Seemingly simple and direct, they provide endless opportunities for reflection and are surprisingly open-ended. While Armstrong makes an excellent point about ‘Model‘, for example, the film also documents the exacting work of making advertisements, something we’re prone to overlook. If ‘The Store‘ is about an engine of commerce that exploits consumers, the consumers in the film are collaborating with that process.

Neither ‘Model‘ nor ‘The Store‘ is a simple satire of fashion. In fact, Wiseman reminds us, nothing is simple. The films instead represent a unique way of thinking about our field, as subjective and expansive as any great work of art can be.

‘The Store’ and ‘Model’ are available from Frederick Wiseman’s production company, Zipporah Films.

Alexander Joseph is a freelance writer and editor in fashion.

1. W Vollman, ‘In Memory of Us All: Some Scenes Out of Wiseman,’ in Frederick Wiseman, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010, pp. 69-76. [Note: Italics are Vollman’s.] ↩

2. D Armstrong, ‘Wiseman’s ‘Model’ and the Documentary Project: Toward a Radical Film Practice,’ in Film Quarterly, California, University of California Press, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Winter 1983-1984), pp. 2-10. ↩