A fitting, fashionable exit
The pursuit of perfection in the golden age of couture is the focus of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film.
The London atelier of couturier Reynolds Woodcock is exactly as you might imagine a peculiarly English temple of mid1950s glamour; all elegant upswept stairs and chignons, shining gowns and chandeliers, the prim pock, pock, pock of heels on marble.
It’s a beautiful thing, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom
Thread, a sleek, then sweet, then dark, then kinky plunge into a love affair set in the imaginary House of Woodcock in the fashion decade that nailed our most persistent archetype of womanly beauty.
I’ll stick my neck out and call it the best fashion film ever made and if doctoral theses aren’t still being written on its millefeuille of meanings – couture’s phantom threads – about love, sex and power in 10 years, I’ll hang up my frockritic pen forever. Consider, for example, this tete-a-tete between Woodcock (Daniel DayLewis, ostensibly in his final film before retirement) and Alma, a young diamond-in-the-rough village girl who has caught his eye and got his creative juices flowing. She’s played by the naturally chic Luxembourg actor Vicky Krieps, a one-to-watch in her first major international role.
‘‘You have no breasts,’’ Woodcock says, measuring Alma for a gown.
‘‘I’m sorry.’’ (She’s not.) ‘‘No, no; it’s my job to give you some. If I choose to.’’ And well may you say ‘‘good grief’’ in this neo-postfeminist age, but such was the golden age of couture, fashion’s era of demi-gods and patriarchy-by-glamorous-design. (Notwithstanding the century’s legendary Mesdames Gres, Vionnet, Lanvin, Cheruit, Paquin, Chanel and Schiaparelli, most high-end couturiers were, and still are, male.) Anderson’s research into 1950s high couture alighted particularly on Cristobal Balenciaga and Charles James. In their typically intense collaborative process, Day-Lewis channelled both legendary couturiers, mastering their most intricate arts of draping, cutting, sewing and tailoring to more truthfully ‘‘inhabit’’ the impeccable and – from his lush shock of peppery grey hair to his perfect brogues – heart-pumpingly handsome Woodcock. (At the zenith of his method-acting immersion, Day-Lewis actually cut and tailored an entire Balenciagaesque suit.) Day-Lewis’ Woodcock is mesmerisingly split, oscillating between arrogance and agony to plug up his high-born women clients’ laundry list of issues from self-loathing to hopeless desire with exquisite couture, and then irritated by his flagging control and child-like weakness as a lover.
‘‘Reynolds is forced to wrestle to the ground his own peculiarities,’’ Anderson says in his film notes (on which I relied for his insights after he cancelled two interviews.) And so Phantom’s threads unspool from its centre. Woodcock’s atelier plays like an allegory of all fashion. The smothering of selfdoubt, bolstering of ego with frocks, suits, cosmetics, hair styles, shoes and accessories. Woodcock and Alma’s affair plays like an allegory of all love. The way we circle and assess each other after that first chemical ping. How we test and test, syrupy sweet at first, then poking, jabbing, badgering for what’s real, what’s going to fit. You and me; are we possible? How much can you take of me? Can I control you?
Eventually erratic, albeit tolerable, synchrony is reached and we are a couple at last. Or not. ‘‘It’s a variation on the gothic romance that examines the intimacy of falling in love against a backdrop of the dangerous battlefield known as the House of Woodcock,’’ Anderson writes.
Woodcock and Alma’s ultimate solution to his needs and her wants crystallises in a shocking final twist. But his first shot across her young bow begins with an offer of beauty; a gown she has not requested. Hence, the tete-a-tete about breasts and whose job it is to bestow them; God or Woodcock.
The gown ‘‘is a love letter to Alma’’, says costume designer Mark Bridges, by phone from LA. ‘‘It’s his way of communicating to her how much he admires her, is enchanted with her.’’ Bridges dived as deeply as Anderson and Day-Lewis into these days of high protocol and the zenith of English couture, surfacing with concepts for gasp-worthy gowns on which the narrative dramatically pivots. ‘‘The ensemble dressing captured my imagination,’’ he says. ‘‘The rules, everything matching; the gown, shoes, jewellery and – the height of luxury – gloves the same fabric as the gown.’’ Women’s bodies were sculpted, corrected, manipulated into the ideal. ‘‘Underpinning, the right kind of structure, the right shape under the dress was so important,’’ Bridges says. ‘‘Defining and making the waist look as small as possible.’’ Woodcock’s first couture overture to Alma is a ball gown in pale lavender duchess satin, with a peculiarly feminine rustle and Hollywood-esque lustre. Woodcock/Bridges also overlaid the bodice, fitted snug to Alma’s torso and framing her milky-pale bare shoulders, with a rare curlicued ivory lace, delicately snipped and stitched to spill downward onto the gracefully swayed skirt and upwards from its floor-sweeper hemline.
The lace cranks up the gown’s girly modesty without dialling down its glamour and, if fashion is indeed a system of semiotics, a visual language with its own grammar and syntax as first theorised by academic Alison Lurie in the 1980s, then this is indeed a love letter to Alma by a man with a precise recipe for how she might fit into his world. If she will only accept and concede.
‘‘That moment when he dresses her is very complex,’’ Krieps says by phone from London. ‘‘It’s not only putting her in a box, it’s also wrapping her in beauty, wrapping her in warmth. It’s not negative to her, it feels like a blessing for Alma because there’s been a lot of cold wind in her life.’’ Krieps’ Alma is
Phantom Thread’s elegant innocent, passive and bemused by Woodcock’s ordered life (supervised by his flinty sister Cyril, exquisitely realised by Lesley Manville) and his elegantly tetchy tests: ‘‘There is entirely too much movement at breakfast,’’ he carps one morning, his serenity shattered by Alma’s thunderous toast-buttering, crunching and teapouring.
It’s a hilarious moment but the irritation phase of falling in love is also thin ice. Every lover knows that. And Alma ultimately switches from patient participant to quiet schemer – with some icky consequences – in her pursuit of synchrony, love and coupledom.
‘‘She finds a way, and it’s an allegory of every kind of relationship that’s found its way,’’ Krieps says. ‘‘It’s like looking at old couples; very, very old couples, and you know they’re together for life because they sometimes have weird and unique ways of being and communicating, ways that are strange but that was their way to meet as two individuals.’’ In his atelier, Woodcock’s wealthy, aristocratic and royal clients are pampered, groomed to gorgeousness, pocked with insecurities. They need beauty; props, masks, reconstructive armour to help them more closely approximate the ideal woman. The loveable woman.
‘‘That’s the power of clothing,’’ Bridges says. ‘‘People can put something on and become someone else, or feel stronger or role play or just feel confident to express themselves.’’ The film’s most remarkable gown achieves all this in spades for the puzzlingly timid Countess Henrietta Harding, played by Gina McKee. ‘‘I feel like it will give me courage,’’ the countess says of the creation Woodcock calibrated especially to fit her foibles. Intriguingly, Bridges adapted the design from an original sketch by Day-Lewis during the pre-production months he spent ‘‘inhabiting’’ Woodcock the couturier.
The gown is frankly hideous; a column skirt of pink silk satin flanked by mounds of bulls-blood velvet cascading to a wide train at the back and flaring to a batwinged bodice with medici diamond splits inset with pearls at the front. Hideous yes, but later in the film, on her husband’s arm at a heraldically grand event, the frock literally props up McKee’s wavering countess as stiffly and surely as a rock-hard carapace. ‘‘He can make the timid courageous and the unattractive feel beautiful,’’ Anderson says of Woodcock in his film notes. Transformation at best, miraculous enhancement at least, is still expected of modern couture. Real-life couturier Anthony Pittorino, partner in the legend-inthe-bud atelier J’Aton, passionately vouches for that. ‘‘So many (clients) aren’t happy with themselves,’’ he laments. ‘‘They’re coming to us, sometimes almost to change completely what they have: ‘I hate my hips! I hate my boobs!’ And, we just look at each other: ‘But, my God, you’re beautiful, like Sophia Loren’…’’ Which is toxic comment, of course, to young women more enamoured of pretty striplings such as Bella Hadid and Cara Delevingne than ancient Italian movie stars. Pittorino laughs ruefully, and describes scenarios close to those played out in the House of Woodcock.
‘‘So we discuss what they’re paranoid about, what makes them feel insecure, and we sort of ‘redraw’ – we call it shading – with boning and shaping (some materials are more aggressive than others) and lines and embellishments to sort of realign the body. It’s really a bit like that old thing; smoke and mirrors.’’ Pittorino and partner Jacob Luppino are masterly sculptors of the classic womanly silhouette, as drawn in the 1950s. And they’ve created their lush, laboriously handworked gowns (costing an average $30,000) for women including Beyonce, Rebecca Judd, Kim Kardashian, Dita Von Teese and myriad proverbial girls-nextdoor.
‘‘The simple truth is, everyone wants to feel beautiful,’’ Pittorino says. ‘‘Men as well as women; they want empowerment, they want acceptance, they want to be liked, they want to be loved.’’ Some of them also want gob-smackingly glamorous transformative couture to ensure their best chance for a match before they embark on their own Phantom-esque quest for coupledom.
●➤ Phantom Thread (M) opens in New Zealand on February 1.