This isn’t an
essay about clothes, exactly, nor is it about fashion, quite. It is
about women and clothes and something that happens between them that we
could think of as a kind of third rail of female experience. I’ve
thought about this for some time but my thoughts were focused when I saw
Isabelle Huppert in Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 film, Elle. The film
begins with a rape about which the victim, Huppert, is ambivalent. This
sent the critics, particularly male critics, scuttling to and fro
wondering whether it was a feminist, post-feminist or anti-feminist
film, or just in some baffling way French. In the Guardian,
Peter Bradshaw went for ‘provocative’, before deciding it was a
‘startlingly strange rape-revenge black comedy’. I didn’t think it was
as strange as all that and I did think it was funny, but what really
struck me was that every woman I knew who had seen it was mesmerised not
by the ‘issues’ but by Huppert, and not just for her acting – she’s
always good – but for what she wore: ‘the clothes’, women said to one
another, were ‘amazing’. Yet when you look at them in stills they aren’t
amazing, they are the epitome of French ready-to-wear chic. So if it
wasn’t the clothes or the actor that created the effect, it was some
compound of the two that created a character, a presence able to walk
the tightrope that carries the film over the fire pit of sexual violence
and women’s agency. ... [mehr] https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n07/rosemary-hill/what-does-she-think-she-looks-like
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| Virginia Woolf in ‘Vogue' |
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