FILM CLIPS / COUTURE ON CAMERA : When Show Biz Takes On Fashion Biz, One Size Fits All

“You ever been to a fashion show? It’s a sort of pagan ritual, a ceremonial dance where the faithful sit around sipping tea and worshiping clothes. There’s a sacrifice involved, too. $1,500 for a dress, so help me. . . .”

--Gregory Peck, as a sportswriter married to a fashion designer in the 1957 film “Designing Woman.”

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When the lights came up after a screening a few weeks ago of Robert Altman’s latest film, “Ready to Wear,” a journalist in the third row turned to the fashion editor sitting next to him and said, “Those clothes weren’t real, were they?” He was referring to the tartan kilts and figure-distorting bustles that, in the film, are the provocative designs of Cort Romney (Richard E. Grant).

“Oh, sure they are,” the editor chirped. “That’s all Vivienne Westwood.”

The reporter couldn’t believe his ears any more than he believed his eyes. What looked to him like fantasy costumes never intended to be worn were actually the clothes that those who attend the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections in Paris, Milan and London--’the faithful,” as Gregory Peck called them in “Designing Woman’--stand up and cheer about. What seemed to this guy to be visual jokes are the styles that fuel fashion, the uncompromised visions of one of the world’s most respected designers.

This man, like Peck’s character, must be forgiven. He is not a fashion person. He is not a member of what has been called “the cult of the initiated.” But that makes him a lot more typical an audience for Altman’s new film, which opens Christmas Day.

Audiences who are not acquainted first hand with the world of high fashion are not likely to believe their eyes, either, as actors like Lauren Bacall and Tracey Ullman rub elbows with such real-life designers as Christian Lacroix, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier. What’s real (editors finding their hotel rooms full of flowers and gifts upon check-in) and what’s fake are all mixed up for this big-screen fashion farce.

But that’s usually what happens when it comes to putting the fashion industry on film. It is a case of one business of artifice trying to capture another business of artifice--cosmetically concealed warts and all. Throughout the years, when Hollywood turns its cameras on the fashion industry, the pictures that emerge are glamorous to be sure. Like the fashion show sequence filmed in color and plugged into the black-and-white world of George Cukor’s 1939 version of “The Women,” fashion injects pizazz into a film. But film isn’t always so kind to fashion.

Although the fashion business adores the movies unconditionally--designers repeatedly find inspiration in the glamorous days of Hollywood’s golden age--it is often a one-sided love affair. The portrait the film world paints of the fashion business is usually not an altogether pretty one.

Models are beautiful but stupid. Designers are coddled, capricious creatures. Fashion editors are flighty fascists. Everyone in the business is superficial, self-obsessed and convinced that what they’re doing is of Earth-shattering importance.

“What has been shown is that they’re basically shallow and that they have no inner lives,” says designer Isaac Mizrahi, who is the subject of a new fashion documentary called “Unzipped” by director Douglas Keeve. ‘Fashion is always treated like the naughty stepchild.”

“Mahogany,” for instance, the 1975 film about a would-be fashion designer (Diana Ross) who becomes a top model, “really said a lot of scary things about fashion,” says Mizrahi. He isn’t referring to the Kabuki-style costumes Ross designed for the film, either. In “Mahogany,” like so many fashion films, the fashion players are emotionally bankrupt. As Ross’ politically correct boyfriend (Billy Dee Williams) says, “Baby, I don’t understand this whole trip . . . making clothes for rich people to look at in a magazine.”

Almost 20 years later, “Ready to Wear” is not nearly as unsettling, biting its broad target, but with rubber teeth. Although Altman acknowledges that fashion often is portrayed as frivolous and superficial, he is surprised by how worried some members of the fashion press were before seeing the picture. “What is it I could say that would be so terrible?” he asks. Making a big deal about nothing is part and parcel of fashion on film and on television. On the British comedy series ‘Absolutely Fabulous,” level-headed daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha) says to her panic-attack-prone mother, Edina, the fashion publicist: “It’s only a fashion show . . . all you’ve got to do is play a bit of music, turn on the lights, get some people who’ve thrown up everything they’ve ever eaten and send them down a catwalk. . . . “ But to Edina (Jennifer Saunders), like the characters in “Ready to Wear” and other fashion features, fashion is life or death.

Films fuel the notion that fashion is something foisted on the public, ridiculously expensive confections shoved down women’s throats. In “Funny Face,” Kay Thompson’s deliciously dictatorial fashion editor Maggie Prescott says “I want the whole country pink!” and launches into a giant ‘Think Pink!” production number that pronounces there’s “not the slightest excuse for plum or puce . . . or chartreuse.” Two minutes later, when asked if she’ll be wearing pink, she says “Me? I wouldn’t be caught dead.” In other words, it’s a power play between fashion people and “real” people.

Fashion people are cultured and refined, gorgeous, effortlessly thin but cadaverously cold. “Face it, we’re a cold lot, artificial and totally lacking in sentiment,” Thompson says in “Funny Face,” when she learns that her photographer (Fred Astaire) has fallen for his new model (Audrey Hepburn). Love for anything but clothes or work is not acceptable.

Real people, on the other hand, are often rubes with hearts of gold who never quite feel comfortable in the rarefied air of the fashion world in which they inadvertently find themselves. In “The Fashion Show” episode of “I Love Lucy,” for instance, Lucy and Ethel go dress shopping in a couture salon. More accustomed to Gimbel’s basement, Ethel asks, ‘Where are the racks? What do you paw through?”

Even dressed in such finery as the Don Loper original Lucy covets so fervently, they would likely not be welcome in the clique. Fashion’s exclusionary nature is always reinforced on film, offering a glimpse of glamour but never with open arms.

“I figured if I put on my new suit maybe I could join the club. I couldn’t. I didn’t speak the language,” says unpolished sportswriter Gregory Peck in “Designing Woman.” Used to a crowd of poker-playing he-men, he’s put off by his new wife’s (Lauren Bacall, who is also in ‘Ready to Wear’) circle of friends. “It’s a silly, ridiculous business,” Bacall says. “It pays far too much money. You meet silly, ridiculous people . . . and I love it.”

For all the ridiculousness, though, the fashion world is a safe haven for the eccentric. The world of “Ready to Wear’--chock full of bisexual designers, heterosexual transvestites and pregnant nude models--is “a comfortable home for people who’ve been ostracized,” Altman says. That has always been true of fashion in real life and in fiction.

One of the funniest examples of this is the “Lily Munster, Girl Model” episode of “The Munsters.” In it, a ghoulish Lily (Yvonne DeCarlo) shows up to a model “go-see” wearing her usual costume--a dress spun of “black widow’s web.” Instead of frightening designer Lazlo Brastoff (Roger C. Carmel), Lily enchants him with her exotic beauty. “Tell the other girls to go home,” Brastoff says.

Sometimes a film or a television program does not have to be about the fashion business to be a “fashion” show. Truly, “The Wizard of Oz” was all about a pair of shoes. “101 Dalmatians” was about a fur coat. Designer Isaac Mizrahi says that films like “Auntie Mame” with Rosalind Russell “say more about fashion than fashion-industry movies often do. They say more about what people look like at that moment.” Certainly, this is true of “American Gigolo,” which helped boost Giorgio Armani’s cachet in America in 1980.

Fashion practically becomes a character in some films. Jean-Paul Gaultier designed the clothes for Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,” including a dress that changes color as the wife goes from room to room, and for Pedro Almodovar’s “Kika,” where the hostess of an exploitation TV news show wears a video camera in her hat and a light-up bra to illuminate her subjects.

“One of the strongest things to happen to fashion was Nolan Miller’s ‘Dynasty.’ Every woman around started looking like Joan Collins,” adds Michaele Vollbracht, an artist and former fashion designer who played himself on a fashion episode of the 1980s series “Hart to Hart.”

Vollbracht has not seen “Ready to Wear” yet--Vollbracht lives in a small town in Florida now--but he is disappointed when he hears that the fashion industry is not savaged by the film.

“I wish it had just annihilated it,” Vollbracht says with a charmingly embittered flair. “But I don’t think they could ever really get the treachery of Seventh Avenue on film. I don’t know if the entertainment industry knows how lethal the fashion industry is. There’s nothing stranger than the real life in fashion.”

He’s lived in the world of ready to wear. He knows.