3 Looks Beyond the Runway

They all came from humble backgrounds, far from the glamour and glare of the fashion world. They all rose to the top, with collateral damage along the way. They are all household names — at least to those who care about clothes.

British designers Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood and American editor André Leon Talley are the subjects of new documentaries that offer peepholes into their extraordinary lives and talents, and on the no-less-extraordinary world of haute couture.

In these films, the three subjects at first appear almost entirely unalike. McQueen, who committed suicide in 2010, is tense, driven and fatally lonely — creating fashion shows about rape, madness and abuse — even as he crafted some of the most exquisitely beautiful and inventive clothes of his epoch.

Westwood — feisty, eccentric, exacting, a warrior for the environment — is testy and compelling while continually asserting her lack of interest in discussing her very interesting past, which includes a prominent role in punk rock, leaving her husband for Malcolm McLaren (who died in 2010) and making clothes for the Sex Pistols. (She agreed to make the documentary, hoping it would be a war cry for her environmental and ethical causes, and has subsequently expressed her disappointment with the film.) And Talley, legendarily extravagant and fabulous, from a modest family in the segregated South, lives up to his reputation while remaining a fascinatingly opaque, solitary figure.

All three are nonetheless linked by their working-class backgrounds, their reinvention of self and their struggle with the duality of a public persona and a private life. The directors of these movies talked about why they were drawn to these subjects, and why they don’t think of their films as fashion documentaries. Here are edited versions of the conversations.

ETTEDGUI: My father [the influential fashion entrepreneur Joseph Ettedgui] was an early champion of McQueen’s work, and I remember him saying, forget all the shocking stuff; he is a genius tailor. I found that very interesting: the craft and sense of tradition on the one hand, and the enfant terrible shocking the world on the other. In documentaries you can present that duplicity with such authenticity.

Everything that had been done about McQueen was fashion-oriented, but the fashion documentaries that I’ve seen miss the emotion, and we went entirely for that, like a movie. On the other hand, what a book or exhibition can’t provide is the experience of witnessing a McQueen show. You feel the kinetic quality of the clothes, which is something he was obsessed with.

I haven’t seen the other films, but I would say that as a storyteller, you are always looking for conflict, the clash of two worlds — someone who rises to the top but is fundamentally a misfit. What’s interesting is that you see that issues we are concerned with now, like #MeToo and mental health, were all there in McQueen’s shows.

BONHÔTE: I am fascinated by people who reinvent the rules, who throw a spanner in the works. They don’t go to the market; the market comes to them. He didn’t just want to make beautiful clothes, he wanted a story and a twist for everything, and he dressed women for themselves, as powerful beings. I think the creative world allows people from all sorts of backgrounds to enter, perhaps more easily than other worlds. McQueen, like the other subjects of these documentaries, had a strong vision and was allowed to exert it. They forced it on society.

TUCKER:Wanting to make this documentary had nothing to do with Vivienne being famous or a designer. It was because she blew me away when we met. She was fiery, completely in control of her company, and I really appreciated that she was an artist, trying to do her work. It didn’t happen overnight; it took her ages to make money and be successful. She was growing old really disgracefully — in her mid-70s and so sexy. We women carry our age like a chain around our necks; she owns it. I felt people could find a deep inspiration in her life story. The fashion is almost an aside; the true story is her working as an older woman, trying to change the fashion industry.

I didn’t focus too much on the punk stuff, because there have been about four documentaries that covered that very extensively from McLaren’s perspective. I wanted this to be about Vivienne; the reason she turned her back on punk is the most interesting part. She realized it had become part of the system, a tourist attraction.

I wasn’t expecting the negative reaction I got from Vivienne and her sons. When I showed it to her, she had a lot of feedback, and I worked hard to incorporate that, but I didn’t want to take out the vulnerabilities. She wanted the film to only be about her activism, but I was always clear that I wanted it to be about her.

NOVACK:I have been watching André in films about other people for about 20 years, and I’ve always wondered about his own story. He is always larger than life and over-the-top — but talking about someone else. Among many other things, for a long time, he has been the only African-American man at his level in the fashion industry and a role model for many people. As well as his singular story, I felt it was a way to look at one man’s experience of race in America. At the beginning of the movie, Eboni Marshall Turman [his friend and an assistant professor of theology and African-American religion at Yale Divinity School] says, “André is at once a legend in mainstream culture and he is also a tall big black man in America, and as such there will always be great tension there.” That was the controlling idea; how can we reveal and slowly unpack that?

As we were filming, it became clear that this was really as much about Durham [in North Carolina], where he grew up, as about Paris or New York. From the beginning he talked about porch culture and the culture of storytelling that he grew up with, and I wanted to place him as our narrator, on his porch telling his story. It’s called “The Gospel According to André” because it’s about his life as he sees it.

To me, one of the most interesting parts of André's character is the way he deals with, or doesn’t deal with, things that are painful or difficult for him. I think there are parts of him that are very protected.

At its core, fashion is about identity and self-creation, and for someone coming from a world they feel they don’t fit into, or a world that feels too confining for their imagination, it is a world into which they can expand and excel.