Fashion Film
Matthew Frost’s epic “Fashion Film” is a piss-take of the highest order: a timely, well-executed takedown of the unadulterated self-indulgence of “fashion films” in general. The film parodies the form, Portlandia-style, focusing on a dreamy-eyed model lost in self-involved oblivion. And like any smart, stinging satire, it is charged with a hurtful truthfulness that reveals quite a bit more than it might upon first glance.
Consider Anna dello Russo’s “Fashion Shower,” the pinnacle of the fashion film genre’s bad side. It’s a grating garbage heap, to be sure, and what essentially amounts to two-and-a-half minutes of droning, frightening emptiness. Not funny, not clever, not sexy, not social commentary. Just so sickly self-serving that anyone who doesn’t count Bryan Boy among his/her idols (likely everyone reading this) must wonder whether there is any chance she isn’t flagrantly, publicly mocking herself. (She isn’t.) Ol’ Anna is serious as a heart attack, and not even a well-deserved Fluorosulphric Acid Shower could wash away the sort of deranged smugness it must take to pull off such ego-driven acrobatics
(I’ll bet you sometimes think to yourself in French, too, don’t you, Anna? Profound.)
We all watched it because, like a fiery car crash, we just couldn’t look away. It was hilarious in its blithe ostentation. But is this really what fashion is? Smug stupidity? Thanks to our girl Anna and her fellow brain dead ilk, most people not actually involved with the long, painstaking, rigorous work of fashion’s production can only be led to think just that. After all, we can’t lament the legions of preteens (and grown-ups) whose favourite pastime is traipsing about making fabulous duck faces into their smartphones when we continue to feed them this shit.
So, Matt Frost’s spot-on blague is one hell of a well-deserved slap to a sick system rife with shallow insipidness. It holds up a zoomed-in mirror to all of fashion’s propensity for pimply pompousness. And though the fashion blogger masses seem to get the joke, not a one yet seems wise to the fact that they’re ultimately the butt of it all: he’s calling you out, fashionisti. It’s probably time to start showing the world you’re not just empty narcissists.
FASHION FILM from Matthew Frost on Vimeo.
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