It’s in the saleslady’s words — refined, purple prose heightened with the language of desire and satisfaction. Luxury, especially in the modern era, isn’t so much a visual signifier as an instrument of reassurance. Something this beautiful and expensive is a foundation for living, secure in the knowledge that merely by existing, it is enriching your life. You still have to do your own emotional heavy lifting, but this silky, scrumptious thing is going to make a reflective screen around all those insecurities you’re scrapping with on a daily basis. And this saleslady, Miss Luckmore (played by Fatma Mohamed in one of the most unforgettable performances of the year), she wants your life to be soothing, sensual, supple. In Fabric’s Miss Luckmore wants you to feel like you can face whatever your day brings sprawled out on a satin magenta throw pillow and clad in the finest scents and your baddest-bitch outfit. Miss Luckmore wants to sell you that outfit, and since you came to Dentley and Soper’s annual sale, the stars are aligning. The prophecy is being fulfilled.
Dentley and Soper’s is a majestic old department store, all pneumatic tubes and Masonic temenos. It is retail as a pagan temple, with nestled conspiracies extending out into the business world as well as deep within, needling the soft underbelly. It’s not quite like Uncle Lewis Vendredi’s Curious Goods in Friday the 13th: The Series — but it’s more like that than Leland Gaunt’s titular store in 1991’s Needful Things. D&S is a high-end boutique, not a consignment store, but it is very much “Of the Damned.” This is a depot for high-dollar-ass nightmares, and it’s specializing tonight in glamour and gore. There’s even a special for you, the viewer, on magical Showgirls-style hand gestures, Hammer and Amicus nightmares, wig-snatching in both a figurative and literal sense, and the exquisitely fashionable cruelty of Petra von Kant. But let’s focus on the dress …
The dress is a remarkable garment. Artery-red with a stylized blue-black patch that could be a bird, or a fish, or a flower. Maybe even a wound. It moves with the wind, or with the body, and there’s a Latin inscription sewn into the hem that loosely translates to, “You wear me and I know you.” The dress is the star of writer-director Peter Strickland’s latest film, and like the director, the dress is a sensual riot that utilizes the medium of cinema to get into your head and all over your skin, concealing your deepest secrets and reeling in the adoring gaze of onlookers. It finds a home with Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, from Mike Leigh’s masterpiece Secrets and Lies), a bank teller coming through a divorce and entering the land of the dating for the first time in decades. They shine together. Not even the terror of blind dates can diminish the team the two make. But the dress has its price.
The following are the many concepts and things that, in my notes on the film, I asked if the dress might be: an alien intelligence; a physical reminder of our reptilian-brain instincts; a compatriot of the Mystery Man from Lost Highway; a vampire of sorts; the physical incarnation of human desire; a jealous aesthete cursed by the ancient gods; capitalism; the Ark of the Covetous; the cruel whims of fashion. All are likely. This dress comes with a body count, and though it doesn’t send folks into stabby fits of rage (though Tobe Hooper’s campy 1990 Anthony Perkins/Mädchen Amick ceremonial Aztec cocktail dress delight I’m Dangerous Tonight lingers in the ether), haute tragedy is all the rage this season.
Strickland made his debut with 2012’s Broadcast-scored giallo freakout Berberian Sound Studio, then channeled Jean Rollin and Harry Kümel in his lesbian S&M/lepidoptery follow-up The Duke of Burgundy in 2014. He’s got a gift for exquisite textures, and he plumbs the grungy depths of human desire with the eyes of a hunter and the dexterity of a magician — his specialty is kaleidoscopic fragments of the unspeakable. This movie is a buffet of human desire that includes all the absinthe you can drink as well as forbidden and impossible delicacies like ortolan or rotisserie-style dodo, all served beneath showers of blood and jeweled glass as unspeakable secret rites with mannequins and precision lighting unfold for your horny delectation. There are elements of Inferno (both Argento’s and Clouzot’s), The Simpsons’ “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Springfield” and The Rocky Horror Show pulled into the maelstrom at the heart of In Fabric, but it is a singular seduction of all the senses that fords its own path.
There are a few stone masterpieces of fashion horror. Blood and Black Lace. Eyes of Laura Mars. Pathos: Segreta Inquietudine. The Neon Demon. And to that rarefied pantheon we gleefully add In Fabric. It is everything.
