ABSTRACT
Documentary cinema’s recent boom in films about the fashion industry has tended to spotlight the talent and resilience of individual designers. Expanding the critical conversation to works that prioritize cultural institutions over creative personalities, this chapter analyzes how the documentaries The September Issue (R.J. Cutler, 2009), Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s (Matthew Miele, 2013), and The First Monday in May (Andrew Rossi, 2016) confront the implications of fashion’s placement in, respectively, magazines, department stores, and art museums. All three films underscore how fashion’s positioning in documentary cinema encourages further provocative reconsiderations of what exactly happens to fashion’s objects and our experience of them when they become mediated by the image – particularly the moving image. Rossi’s film receives particular attention, as it simultaneously interrogates longstanding debates about whether fashion should be understood as art through its behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s (“the Met’s”) annual fashion exhibition and gala.
