Obliquely because of Coco avant Chanel, and partly because of my recent obsession with photography, I’ve been watching documentaries about fashion.

Fashion and photography are siblings — the arts of seeing and of being seen. Aside from live shows, and what’s worn in the café, photography is the prime medium used to communicate about fashion. It also informs photography, and not just wrt advertising: Any photograph that includes faces or spaces inherently also contains an element of mode de vie.

Valentino: The Last Emperor

Okay, this one is mostly about how to be a giant fucking baller when you have infinite money and lots of villas.

Fashion Director: His dogs are Spartan. They don’t have a wardrobe.
Majordomo: What about the cashmere jackets?
Fashion Director: Well, they only wear those when he’s skiing in Gstaad.

The special features are required watching and the documentary itself is actually pretty amusing. It’s obviously all done to the aggrandizement of Valentino’s massive ego, but it somehow comes across as deserved. Masterful propaganda.

According to Wikipeda Valentino’s signature epy-red, rosso Valentino, in CMYK, is (0%, 100%, 100%, 10%), which I’ve reproduced in Photoshop:

Anna Wintour makes an appearance in the “big show” set piece around which the film is constructed.

The September Issue

This one follows Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour as they put together Vogue’s 840-page 2007 September issue. Wintour’s stolen the narrative of the film — she’s one of its USPs and the supposed basis of Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada — but Coddington is the creative force, spending most of her time setting up photographic homages to Brassaï and beautiful color blocking shots for Anna to nix.

Lagerfeld Confidential

I watched this because Lagerfeld visits Valentino in the first film above to congratulate him. Comparing Lagerfeld to Valentino you can see why the latter deserves the “Emperor” sobriquet — Lagerfeld is an artist, and Valentino something else entirely. Also, in a pleasant show of accidental wabi-symmetry, Grace Coddington makes a pre-show appearance at Chanel’s apartment (which was featured in avant).

The distro on TPB needs subtitles unless you parlez. Luckily they’re easy to find.

Lagerfeld comes across as highly-eccentric and perhaps more psychologically damaged than he cares to admit. He started shooting in the 80s because no one around him was doing it right, and his implicit advice to new photographers seems sound: Put in a bit of practice and you’ll see that you’re not terrible.