Prêt-à-Porter, Robert Altman’s 1994 satirical take on the fashion industry, should’ve and could’ve been another sparkling ensemble showcase from the director of Nashville, HealtH and The Player. At least, that’s true sur papier. Alas, le film – which will henceforth be referred to by its revised, Anglicized title Ready to Wear – remains a complete mess, a wasted opportunity. The film, set against the backdrop of High Fashion, revolves around a constellation of characters: designers, models, journalists and industry insiders. All convene in Paris during the city’s storied Fashion Week. Misbegotten hijinks and intrigue (including a jumbled murder mystery subplot) ensue throughout its two-hours-plus runtime. The result is mind-numbing, if not utterly bad. Still, a question nags. How could a director, riding high off of 1993’s excellent and sprawling L.A. opus Short Cuts, released just a year earlier, descend into such mediocrity?
Ready to Wear explores the supposed absurdities of the runway, depicting (with typical, Altman-esque flair) the intertwining tales of multitudinous characters, whose trajectories crisscross and eventually converge onto a glamorous and hectic concluding event. This loose narrative web attempts to tie the personal and professional realities of absurd individuals, highlighting their relationships (mostly transactional), ambitions (mostly stratospheric) and eccentricities (mostly off-the-charts) against a milieu of what this talented auteur obviously deems superfluous, if not outright preposterous.
Ready to Wear, like most of Altman’s expansive works, is best known for its sterling ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Anouk Aimée, Lili Taylor, Rupert Everett, Tracey Ullman, Teri Garr, Danny Aiello, Ute Lemper, Stephen Rea, Sally Kellerman, Richard E. Grant, Forest Whitaker, Lyle Lovett and on and on and on. These actors struggle to capture the intricacies of the fashion world while at the same time lampooning its excesses, its vanities, its superficialities.
The plot, if such a term can apply to Ready to Wear, is proudly slapdash and roulette-wheel random. A dignitary chokes on a ham sandwich (Jean-Pierre Cassel), instigating a wrongful death investigation at the supposed hands of a dastardly Russian (Mastroianni). A pair of American journalists covering Fashion Week (Roberts and Robbins) become romantically involved in a shared hotel room. Three rival magazine editors seek vengeance against a photographer (Rea) following a collective humiliation. A woman (Aimée) purposely sends models naked down the catwalk as an act of retribution. All the while, a twangy American (Basinger) — let’s be real, she’s a stereotypical Southern hick — covers the shenanigans in the style of an Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood correspondent.
If this all reads as frothy and scintillating, the broad and threadbare final product of Ready to Wear will disabuse you of that notion, quickly. It’s a confusing picture, at once a jeremiad chronicling the upper echelons of society, but whose jaunty sensibility screams at itself, a film that leers lustily at a too-easy dartboard bullseye.
The fundamental problem with Ready to Wear is that it misunderstands its (obviously surface-level) subject, the central focus of Altman’s dripping disdain. For example: Project Runway, which premiered on television (airing on the cable channel Bravo) a decade later, in 2004, proved designing and constructing cutting-edge silhouettes and showstopping garments was, at the very least, no easy task and, in some cases, could be transcendent. Next came 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, which still stands as a full-throated, and well-argued, apologia for the importance of pure fashion that pop-entertainment has ever conveyed. Meryl Streep’s magisterial monologue about a particular shade of blue (in this case, cerulean) — its highfalutin origin and bargain-basement conclusion — wipes away any sense that an entire industry is built on quicksand. Ready to Wear, with its withering and blinkered takedowns of shallow creative pursuits, things like frocks and slacks, tells on itself. It’s weird and out of step, at least by modern lenses.
This isn’t to say we should penalize a work of art, retroactively, for what’s now considered a bad cultural take. If Ready to Wear were a better movie, these contemporary sins would be instantly absolved, wiped away in an instant. The bottom line is: Ready to Wear is worse than lackluster. Like the stilettos we see, over and over, planting themselves into canine excrement during the film, Ready to Wear similarly steps in dog shit. Altman was at his late-career peak here, and this was a clear whiff when compared to the recent glories of (The Player and Short Cuts). He would quickly learn a lesson, soon returning to form with a picture that overturned the murder mystery, setting the stage for a genre trend that continues to reverberate forward today.
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