Documentary Corner: Mademoiselle C

As evidenced by what I've discussed here so far, I'm a big fan of documentaries.  Especially of fashion documentaries.  I've seen:

Unzipped
The September Issue
Valentino: The Last Emperor
The Tents
L'Amour Fou
In Vogue: The Editor's Eye
About Face
The Eye Has to Travel

There are probably others that I'm not thinking of right now.  But I love behind the scenes stories.  I love Project Runway and I have a bit of a fascination with Kell on Earth, which was only on for one season.  But that's for another entry.

As a kid, I loved fashion. I think I loved the spectacle and fantasy of it.  It was a real fantasy in the everyday kind of moment.  I didn't have access to fashion around me as a kid, so I read lots of fashion magazines and they transported me away.  My biggest sources of information and reading were fashion magazines and comic books.

PAUSE: There's something in the intersection of fashion magazines and comic books that I'll have to visit later.  But not a SUPERmodel.  

I also love big personalities and hyperbole.  So fashion is perfect for me in that regard.  I love any one who's a character.  These fashion people in the documentaries or the ones who were interviewed on TV had these larger than life personalities and always a catch phrase. I remember Andre Leon Talley, who I was obsessed with as a kid, said in Unzipped, "The comeback is major!"  Polly Mellen also said in that documentary, "This is saying 'yes' to me very distinctly."  That became by catchphrase in college, a fact I had forgotten but was reminded of when I came back for a wedding last April.  I watched Fashion Television, CNN's Style with Elsa Klensch, Videofashion, and just about anything else I could get my hands on.  House of Style!  I loved House of Style.

So now as an adult, I have met a group of people who shared my obsession. And whenever a fashion documentary comes out, we make a date of it and go together.  Last Sunday, I went to see Mademoiselle C, the documentary about Carine Roitfeld former French Vogue editor, with my friends Emily and Amanda.  As a documentary, it wasn't the most cohesive.  As a writer, I felt it could have used a story and it could have been more like The September Issue, which was really about the personalities involved in the shoots that were put together for the Vogue September Issue.  This was not as in depth.  The September Issue felt like an expose.  This felt more like a fly on the wall.  But who wouldn't want to be a fly on the wall when Carine Roitfeld is putting together her first issue of CR Fashion Book?

It had all the things I love about fashion documentaries.  It had great fashion, great personalities and people waxing poetic about how purposeful the fashion life is.  I ate it up.  And it was just a great cleansing gelato at the end of a long week.  Pretty people, smart talk, a bit of the esoteric...kind of sounds like theatre.