Apocalypse Then; Apocalypse Not

Terrence Stamp twits the establishment in "Toby Dammit"

The opening credits of Federico Fellini's "Toby Dammit" (1968) state that it is "liberally adapted from Edgar A. POE's novel, 'Don't wager your head to the Devil.'" That's a pretty apt description. After the credits, "Toby Dammit" picks up aboard a jet headed for Rome, heralding its more modern take on the gothic writer's works. Originally presented as the third — and best — part of the international omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, the short must have come as a shock to contemporary audiences, particularly following the feature's other, more traditional, period adaptations by Roger Vadim ("Metzengerstein") and Louis Malle ("William Walton"). It's still a shock today to anyone who actually reads. This isn't the world of Poe we've come to expect from high-school English classes. But in many ways, the film is as self-absorbed and oneiric as Poe's more visionary works. Like Poe, Fellini works from his subconscious to queer his chosen art form; he uses his medium to interrogate images he can't fully understand until he's worked them out in his art.

With seemingly random shots of nuns at the airport caught in a sudden gust of wind, their black veils and robes billowing around them, a roadside fashion shoot as the title character is driven to a television appearance and the grotesque participants in a surrealistic awards ceremony, this was the first film in which Fellini turned the dreamlike incursions from earlier works like 8 ½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965) into his style for a complete film. As such, it prefigures pictures like Fellini Satyricon (1970) and Roma (1972), in which reality is destabilized throughout.

The title character played by Terence Stamp with badly bleached hair and a zonked-out, other-worldly detachment is a one-time Shakespearean actor who's sold himself out for film stardom. He's in Rome to shoot a spaghetti Western his producers assure him is an allegory for the life of Christ. He doesn't care about their pretensions. All he wants is the Ferrari they promised as partial payment (a jab at Clint Eastwood, who had demanded the same compensation for taking a small part in 1967's The Witches). To forget this betrayal of his talents, Toby has soaked himself in drugs and alcohol. Terence Stamp plays him as if he were seeing things nobody else can (which is literally true in some cases, as he has visions of the devil as a little girl with long blonde hair and a white ball). In a way he's a satire of self-important actors of the day, reminiscent of Marlon Brando or Oskar Werner in some of their moodier interviews. And 50 years later, he seems to be prophesying the behavior of actors like James Franco and Shia LaBoeuf, whose off-screen performances of self often threaten to upstage their on-screen work. However much the character may be out of control, Stamp isn't. The beauty of his performance is that he makes original, idiosyncratic choices, yet you never lose faith that there's something behind everything he does. It's easy to let yourself get lost in his madness.

Fellini's vertiginous style is perhaps a little easier to follow today. We've seen his later films, other directors' imitations of his work and even television commercials and music videos mimicking that style. Yet it's no less potent for that. He's trying to accomplish a lot in this film. Overall, it seems to be sending up the very Euro-culture that made him a directing superstar. It's the same world in which Guido Anselmi felt trapped in 8 ½, yet with Fellini's more dreamlike approach here, it's all so over-the-top in its vulgarity that it's much easier to side with Toby, no matter how strange he may seem. In addition, there are parts pointing toward a more mechanized future — the airport monitors where a disembodied head advises on flights and weather conditions, the television interview with a mannequin-like host who has to crawl out of the shot so Toby can be interviewed by what, to the home viewer, would be a series of disembodied voices. It's a post-human culture in stark contrast to Toby's tortured humanity.

To obtain an American release for Spirits of the Dead, Fellini had to cut ten minutes out of "Toby Dammit." The American distributor, Samuel Z. Arkoff, felt the awards-show sequence was too personal to play in the U.S, as if Fellini were just working out his personal grudges against the Italian film industry. The sequence is restored in the version streamed by The Criterion Collection on FilmStruck, which is a good thing. It's central to Fellini's ideas and strengthens the motivation for Toby's wild drive in search of an open road, some kind of freedom, when he finally gets his Ferrari.

Yes, the sequence is filled with Fellini's personal grievances, but there's an underlying unity to it all. The awards scene extends the theme of dehumanization with a bitter satire of the commodification that takes place when art forms are excessively commercialized. The preening, self-important producers are too drunk with their own power to see how ridiculous and inhuman they are. When they announce the awards for actresses, the camera focuses on the winners' body parts, suggesting that the female form has been commodified as well. That joke plays particularly well today, as women are fighting for more equitable treatment within the film industry. Within the film's context it links to a scene just before that, in which a woman leaves one of the producers to offer Toby a life of happiness, telling him "I am the one you have always waited for." As will happen with the award-winning actresses, she's shot as a series of body parts, with emphasis on cleavage and her heavily made up eyes. She's just another commodity, like the Ferrari, offered up to keep him in line.

Toby himself is commodified. When he arrives at the awards ceremony, he's informed that he will be called up to say a few words, maybe some Shakespeare, but nothing too long. His new bosses want only enough of his artistry to give their work some cultural capital but not so much they might actually have to deal with the questions art raises. When he finally makes it to the stage, surrounded by models in fashions that make the human form something mechanical and variety entertainers who move like automata, he launches into the only possible Shakespearean speech for the moment, "Out, out brief candle" from Macbeth. He gets as far as "It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury," then stops, leaving out the speech's final two words, "signifying nothing." Of course, at this point, he doesn't need them. You can tell that this evening of self-congratulation is ultimately meaningless. For Toby, however, it's a kind of breakdown, an attempt at self-realization. He loses the thread of the speech, launches into a rambling diatribe about selling out his art and then runs out into the night.

By this point, it's pretty clear that Toby has nothing left to offer the devil. His soul was lost a long time ago when he chose stardom over art. In a final, desperate effort to escape he drives his Ferrari through the streets in search of what? Rome, he says, but also some kind of freedom or even reality. He keeps running into streets that are really movie sets, and the people standing along the road are mostly mannequins he eventually plows down.  He finally comes to a bridge that's been closed for construction. He sees the devil, the little girl with the ball, on the other side of a gap, and tries to jump it in his car. The leap for freedom (is the end of 1991's Thelma & Louise meant to echo this?) is his final wager, and he loses. There's a shot of a string of cable with blood before the camera reveals his blood lying on the road.

Although Spirits of the Dead was sold in the U.S. as a horror film, capitalizing on the popularity of Roger Corman's increasingly delirious Poe adaptations, that final shot is the closest Fellini gets to genre tropes. The true horror, however, is the nightmare world he's created. Toby has sold himself to a world that relentlessly eats away at humanity. In  a sense, however, Fellini is also a part of that world. He doesn't hesitate to exploit Stamp's sexiness (has any actor that good ever looked so appealing in the Mod fashions of the late 1960s?). Some of Giuseppe Rotunno's shots of him driving along the roads, with the breeze whipping through his hair, are almost stunningly erotic. That makes the film a form of meta-cinema, film commenting on itself. Does Fellini see himself as another Toby Dammit? That would certainly link the film to 8 ½. If I value "Toby Dammit" more than the earlier picture, it may be that the short film's brevity makes it less of a wallow in self-pity. Fellini sets up Toby's situation, then ends the film with a cinematic flourish that ties it into its genre while keeping it divorced from reality. It's a vision of an artistic apocalypse that's somehow light as a dream, albeit the kind of dream that can leave you shaken for hours after waking.

Norman McLaren turns mutually assured destruction into a human cartoon in "Neighbours."

Canadian animator Norman McLaren crams the apocalypse into eight minutes in his influential short "Neighbours" (1952), also available on FilmStruck and YouTube. Amazingly, even that short running time had to be cut for American audiences.

The film is simple, comic and powerful. Using a technique dubbed "pixilation," which involves filming human beings in stop motion, essentially making the human form into a machine, he depicts two neighbors living in harmony — one even lights the other's pipe as they're out reading in the sun — until a flower pops up between their properties. Each tries to claim the bloom, leading a series of escalating sight gags. It's reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy's comedies of destruction like "Big Business" (1929).  They build fences that conveniently swerve around the flower, then use the pickets to duel with each other, before destroying the fence, their homes and, ultimately, each other.

At one point they knock over the cutouts that indicate their houses, and each attacks the other's wife and child. That was considered too extreme for U.S. audiences in 1952, so the brief bit was cut. It must have made sense back then, as the film received an Oscar nomination for Best Short Subject and won for Best Documentary Short (an amazing miscategorization long since acknowledged by the Academy). By 1967, McLaren was able to restore the scene with no complaints. After brutal satires like Dr. Strangelove (1964), which may have been influenced by "Neighbours," and the current spate of body porn horror films like Hostel (2005), the sight of one of the men dropkicking his neighbor's baby, gets a big laugh. It's the next logical step in the string of increasingly violent gags.

Critics have called McLaren's political commentary simplistic, but how much nuance can you get into eight minutes? For that matter, how much nuance is there in the 95 minutes of Dr. Strangelove? As commentaries on the Cold War, both films are about as complex as they need to be. It's not as if the final slides, using various languages to urge the viewer to "Love Thy Neighbour", demand a rebuttal.

The suspense in Friend Request is brutal.

Can anything break through Alycia Debnam-Carey's placid beauty?

The apocalypse is social in Friend Request (2017), a horror film set against the world of Facebook. The film has a nifty premise. College golden girl Laura (Debnam-Carey) tries to reach out to the outcast Marina (Liesl Ahlers). When Marina gets too clingy, Laura cuts her off, inadvertently driving the girl to suicide. Then the fun begins. Marina's spirit takes over Laura's Facebook account (the social media platform is never mentioned by name, but all of the images are clear imitations of Facebook pages). Marina posts a video of her suicide to Laura's page and then starts driving Laura's friends to suicide and posting those images. In short order, Laura is expelled from college and starts losing friends. As the action unfolds, the status bar from her homepage is superimposed over scenes, showing the friend count dwindling away until it reaches zero.

The premise has a lot going for it. After all, this is the age of social media, good or bad (and sometimes both at the same time). I have friends who use Facebook as an effective marketing tool for their work in the arts. I've used it that way myself. I've even tried using it as a teaching aid (only to discover that videos and articles related to performance theory just can't compete with cute cats and political memes). But I also have friends I had to silence because they posted every song they listened to on Spotify. If you read enough political comments or subscribe to any of the pages on film, you also may share my belief that Facebook is where critical thinking has gone to die. All that's relatively benign, however, compared to social media's use as a vehicle for spreading bigotry and bullying.

So, Friend Request starts with a good idea. One of things attracting Laura to Marina is her art; Marina's Facebook page if filled with intriguing gothic images and animations that give the film's early scenes a great visual spin. And Debnam-Carey isn't a bad actress. Her face may not move a lot, but there's always something going on behind her eyes. The light there is strong enough to register even on television, where she did pretty good work on The 100 and Fear the Walking Dead (the latter after the writers finally decided to give her a character). And just for fun she not only has a hot boyfriend (William Moseley, of the Narnia movies) but also a hot back-up guy (Connor Paolo of Gossip Girl, Revenge and the great 2010 mumble gore flick Stake Land). Once the action gets going, sadly, that's just not enough.

Screenwriters Matthew Ballen, Phillip Koch and Simon Verhoeven (who also directed) give Marina a backstory to explain her outcast status and her ability to haunt Laura's Facebook page. She came from a coven that was destroyed in a fire. Then she went to an orphanage where two boys abused her before meeting their own untimely end. Somewhere in there a hive of wasps got in on the action as well, but I've long since forgotten or blocked the connection. Those three elements — fire, the bullies and wasps — are the main images haunting Laura's friends and driving them to suicide. They're pretty much beaten to death, so instead of the hallucinatory body counts of classic screen killers like Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, Marina's murders become kind of boring.

The film also commits a cardinal sin in horror. They use Marina's mythology to concoct an expert scheme to end the haunting by social media, and then forget it. Failed attempts to take out the monsters are one thing. One of the best scenes in The Thing From Another World (1951) occurs when they mistakenly try to set the monster on fire. It's a terrifying study in light, shadow, movement and sound. But you can't build a film's climax around an elaborate scheme to find the source of the haunting and destroy it, only to give up the whole thing, which is what Friend Request does. Basically, logic takes a holiday, with an ending that seems intensely dramatic but really doesn't make any sense — the kind of thing high-school sophomores would consider profound until they grew up. Any good will the film has built up, of course, has been completely dispelled by that point, leaving the climax something to laugh at, not with.

Passions

Dueling passions in one of Stephen Sondheim's most romantic musicals

In her final novel, Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers writes:

Passion makes you daydream, destroys concentration on arithmetic, and at the time you most yearn to be witty, makes you feel like a fool. In early youth, love at first sight, that epitome of passion, turns you into a zombie so that you don't realize if you're sitting up or lying down, and you can't remember what you have just eaten to save your life.

Passion queers everything. And Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical Passion, recorded for Public Television in 1996, seems a two-hour illustration of that.

Based on Ettore Scola's Passione d'Amore (1981), itself an adaptation of I.U. Tarchetti's 1869 novel Fosca, the musical traces the invalid Fosca's infatuation with Giorgio, a young captain garrisoned in the provincial mountain town where she lives with her cousin, Colonel Ricci. Giorgio is already involved with the married Clara, who refuses to leave her husband and son for him. Initially taking pity on Fosca, Giorgio offers his friendship, but she wants more. She considers him a kindred soul in that, unlike his fellow officers, he reads and has an appreciation for the arts. She has watched him with his men and notes that "They hear drums/You hear music/As do I."

For Giorgio and the audience, the idea of loving Fosca initially seems unthinkable. His lover Clara is a beautiful, full-bodied woman, and when the actors in the roles, Jere Shea and Marin Mazzie, share a duet in bed at the show's opening, they seem like perfect wedding-cake toppers. Theirs is the idealized romantic pairing of musical comedy, even though Clara is unavailable to him. Or perhaps they're perfect because she's unavailable. Their big duet, "Happiness," is more about yearning than union. She may sing that "I thought where there was love/There was shame./But with you/There's just happiness," but their love is not won freely. Even though she claims to want to spend her life with him, it's a dream deferred. She can't leave her husband until her son is grown for fear of losing her child. But isn't yearning a better subject for a musical than union. Most shows end after the couples have been united following a series of crises that keep them apart so they can sing of how much they want each other. The few musicals that follow their leads after marriage, like Carousel or I Do, I Do, have plots that throw obstacles in their way, so they're never completely happy until the end (and when you're married to an abusive lout like Billy Bigelow, what greater comfort can there be than knowing he's dead; he may be with you in spirit, but he can never lay hands on you again).

If yearning is more dramatic than union, of course, poor Fosca holds a near monopoly on the drama in Passion. As detailed in a musical flashback, she was always a plain woman, but she fell prey to a bogus count who married her and bled her family dry. Once he had been exposed, Fosca developed the illnesses that plague her throughout the show. Her sickliness makes her an inherently queer figure. As she states in her first scene, "Sickness is as normal to me, as health is to you." But though she initially seems reconciled to her limitations, singing "How can I have expectations?/Look at me….I do not hope for what I cannot have!/I do not cling to things I cannot keep!," she falls in love with Giorgio and pursues him with an obsessive fervor.

In a conventional musical, Fosca would be the villain, keeping the beautiful, young lovers apart. But Sondheim and Lapine are anything but conventional. The plot is structured to privilege Fosca and her misplaced passion. When Giorgio writes to Clara about Fosca, she cautions him to keep his distance, leading to a series of choices on his part that just deepen Fosca's obsession. Suddenly, the ideal beauty seems cruel, even jealous of a woman who, in conventional terms, poses no threat to her. If there's a flaw in the plot it's that Giorgio, at this point, seems too callow to deserve Fosca's love. Fortunately, Shea plays him with vulnerability that keeps the character appealing. From the start, you can see what Fosca sees in him, and over time you may even question, as Fosca does, how truly deep his romance with Clara is.

It helps tremendously that Fosca is played with depth and restraint by Donna Murphy. Not living in New York, I've never had the chance to see Murphy on stage, though I've read raves for her work from others. In the few recordings I've heard besides Passions, she demonstrates a beautiful mezzo voice but also a tendency to overdue things when given her head. That's borne out with the numbers from her revival of Wonderful Town that have turned up on line. In "A Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man," she overplays the jokes so much it makes the material seem more labored than it is. And she mugs so shamelessly during "Swing," a wonderful piece of character development as originally played by Rosalind Russell, that she completely loses the song's throughline.

 Working with Lapine (who also directs) and Sondheim, however, she gives herself over entirely to the material. Lapine wisely doesn't go overboard making Fosca physically repellent. He just has her painted down a bit, and director and actor have worked out a halting, stooped walk that makes her physical condition clear. Sondheim's music lets her glow vocally, with deep notes and repeated phrases that bring her passions to life. Before the show is over, pretty little Clara doesn't stand a chance.

Recorded stage shows can often be a chore to watch. The actors often keep their performances pitched for the last balcony and come off forced and phony when the camera moves in for close-ups. With Passions, that's not the case. This is already one of Sondheim's most fluid and intimate musicals — really more of a chamber opera than a Broadway show — and this is the rare taped version that reveals subtleties a live audience might have missed. Lapine only occasionally falls prey to another danger of the recorded production, the over-reliance on close-ups. That's only really a problem when Giorgio reunites with Clara on leave in Milan while Fosca sings in the background. The point of the number is the contrast between Fosca's solitude and their togetherness, creating the sensation that she's starting to tear the couple apart. Lapine keeps the camera on Shea and Mazzie so much, however, that Murphy seems almost an afterthought in the trio, her disembodied voice hardly completing with their physical presence. It contradicts everything else he and Sondheim have done to make her role in the triangle the primarily one. Sometimes the perpetual long shot most often associated with stage pictures isn't such a bad idea.

Otherwise, the recorded production is pretty much seamless. Filmed just after the play's original Broadway run ended, it preserves not just the original leads' performances, but strong supporting turns from people like Gregg Edelman as Fosca's cousin and the late Tom Aldredge and Francis Ruivivar as the company doctor and an officer in love with opera, respectively. The production flows beautifully on Adrianne Lobel's simple but effectively painted sets, a symphony in siennas that gives the whole thing a glow. It's a great record of a strong production and, when Murphy and Shea are digging deep into their characters' emotional lives, almost a privilege to watch.

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Grasping at happiness in Keep the Lights On

Ira Sachs shoots his semi-autobiographical feature Keep the Lights On (2012) as if it were an Ingmar Bergman film. The tale of a gay romance destroyed by one partner's drug use and the other's dogged determination to save his addict boyfriend places its passions within the characters rather than between them. That's partly a product of Sachs' approach to filming the material. He uses the camera as an objective observer. The first time the lawyer, Paul (Zachary Booth) lights up a crack pipe during a date with filmmaker Erik (Thure Lindhardt), there's none of the foreboding music or harsh angles of a Hollywood anti-drug screed. Sachs shoots the encounter straight on. Indeed, Paul's drug use seems almost a matter-of-fact part of his character. To know him is to put up with him. The camera never sides with Erik as he deals with Paul's lengthy absences and self-destructive behavior. It just records the dissolution of a relationship.

Keep the Lights On is not for all audiences. It's not a romantic comedy, nor does it wallow in Erik's inability to find and keep a partner. And the dialogue is high context — characters don't tell each other things they know already just so the audience will be clued in. You have to pay attention to contextual clues to follow the action. After suffering through independent gay films that seemed to be set in fantasy worlds divorced from the realities of LGBTQ life or scripts whose writers seem to think all they have to do to strike a blow for inclusion is turn the mean girls of a stereotypical high school rom com into gay men, however, you may find Sachs' point of view refreshing. He creates an illusion of honesty that lends the story emotional weight without pounding you over the head.

Sachs based the script — co-written with Mauricio Zacharias, who would become a frequent collaborator — on his relationship with literary agent Bill Clegg, who told his side of the story in his 2010 memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. Even though Paul does some horrid things to Erik, including hiring a hustler to have sex with him in a hotel suite while Erik is waiting in the next room, the film never judges him. By the end, he even seems to have a more honest take on the relationship than does Erik.

Erik's staying with Paul through the worst could seem masochistic, but Sachs provides some context that mitigates that impression. The film opens with Erik on a telephone hot line looking for sex and then follows him on an unpromising hook-up. That simply and even humorously sets up the world in which he's looking for love. The hot line calls are brief, with one of the parties hanging up when things don't fit some prescribed formula for sex or romance. His hook-up admits up front that he has a partner, and he wants Erik to admire his physique from across the room before he'll go any further. If those are the options, maybe trying to get an otherwise charming partner through drug addiction doesn't seem like such a deal-breaker.

Sachs is a master at revealing characters through details. The film covers eight years, from Erik's initial hook-up with Paul in 1998 to their meeting after Paul's second stint in rehab in 2006. There are quick scenes during the relationship that fill us in on Erik's career trajectory as he moves from borrowing money from his family for his big project, a documentary about gay photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard, to the film's successful release. We see him win a film festival award for the film, but he never tells anybody how well he's doing. Rather, we see the décor in his apartment gradually change to reflect his success.

The other characters are also drawn simply. The wonderfully open actress Julianne Nicholson has the largest supporting role, as one of Erik's colleagues. In just a few scenes, she and the writers create a woman as adrift as Erik when it comes to relationships. She even tries to get him to agree to help her get pregnant if she can't find a suitable partner by a certain time. Other characters are etched with a gesture or a look. You can tell by the way another friend, Russ (Sebastian La Cause), hugs Erik after a disastrous dinner that he has a crush on him.

When Erik and Paul reconnect in 2006, you don't need dialogue to tell you they haven't seen each other in a while. It's all there in the way they touch, the way they look at each other across a restaurant table. That scene is so skillfully done it's almost a pity the film doesn't end there. In the final scenes, Sachs' high-context writing actually becomes a problem. The final developments in the relationship seem to come from nowhere. Still, the film never gives into sentimentality. There are no jumps into a future where Erik has finally found happiness. Within the world of Keep the Lights On, there are no happy endings, just more drifting through an uncertain emotional landscape in search of something less terrible than cruising for a quick hook-up.

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Fashion becomes art at the climax of House of Z.

Growing up in Philadelphia, I was regularly exposed to a commercial jingle suggesting "If you've got a passion for fashion/And you've got a craving for savings/Take the wheel of your automobile/And swing on down to Ideal." The current spate of design competition shows on cable seem created for people with a passion for fashion, though the types of clothing produced by contestants don't seem likely to satisfy any cravings for savings. With the work of Project Runway judge Zac Posen, however, there's really no price tag that's appropriate. As shown in the documentary House of Z (2017), he has the ability to transcend clothing and even fashion to create works of art.

Director Sandy Chronopoulos structures the film as though it were the finale of a reality competition like Project Runway. Focusing on his Fall 2014 Fashion Week show, she builds suspense by positioning the collection as a comeback after the decline of the fashion market following the 2008 recession and a disastrous Paris show in 2010. The 2014 show breaks from tradition. At the last minute Posen pulls out of the usual Fashion Week venues to present in his own studio, and he's only showing 25 looks, when the average collection can be as large as 75. Even that number is jeopardized when the showpiece of the collection, an ornate gown modeled on the Guggenheim's ceiling, has so many construction problems it may not make it to the runway.

All of this is very entertaining. It's a model of how to cut together documentary footage, interviews and archival materials to tell a story. It's so persuasive you may overlook the fact that the entire film was made with Posen's full cooperation, including appearances by family members, champions in the press and current colleagues. That certainly blurs the lines between documentary and publicity. Yet it's hard to deny the artistry of his work as a designer. In addition, his interviews have a candor that lends the story credibility. When he owns the past mistakes that led to a rift with his mother and sister, who had helped him found his atelier, it seems like a privileged view inside the unattainable world of glamour. Nor can you deny the quality of his work, particularly when that massive gown walks the runway.

This is hardly a rags to riches story. Even Posen's supporters in the press have been quick to note that his initial success was helped greatly by his connections within the fashion industry. Posen is the son of artist Stephen Posen and corporate attorney, Susan Orzack Posen, who exposed him to culture from an early age. One of his childhood friends was Anna Wintour's son, which guaranteed him an in at Vogue. None of that would have mattered, however, without talent. Chronopoulous includes shots of student work and his first showing (in 2001) that clearly position him as a major talent from the start. Posen has a special knack for re-working the best of the past with a contemporary edge in the choice of materials, colors and detail, all accomplished with impeccable craftsmanship. The film makes much of the fact that he's one of the few designers who still has all of his work done in-house, and there's a good deal of footage showing him taking a hand in the construction of his garments.

It's a rarified world the film reveals. Some of the most elaborate designs really couldn't be worn by anybody, and several would be impossible to produce at a saleable price. That's not necessarily a bad thing. His looks go beyond the utilitarian to become their own art forma. There's even an autobiographical element to the work, as the first, technically accomplished pieces, the work of a young artist celebrating his own abilities, become more refined with maturity, then veer into gimmickry during the period in which he lost touch with his talent and his roots only to come back to the greater refinement and epic vision of a more mature designer. Ultimately, that makes fashion the entire story, and it's a pretty powerful one as his work queers our notions of conventional clothing and turns his models into creatures of fantasy.