We here at En Vague have always had a not-so-guilty bent for movies about the fashion industry (eg: Blow-Up, Zoolander, although not [blah] Prêt-à-Porter); not solely for its extra-picturesque potential (i.e.: über-photogenic figures in ultra-photogenic landscapes), nor for the simple pleasures of sighting en vogue celebrities-as-themselves (Valentino Garavani: the shiniest man on Earth), but also, and more formally, for the very ways in which the fashion-movie genre parenthetically conflates two culture industries.
So comes the strange world of fashion as instrumentalized by mainstream Hollywood, and a process of cultural reification that diverts the esoteric economy of the avant-garde as a capital abstraction used in the production of the popular imaginary — the effect of one industry augmenting its place in the common culture by denying another strange industry its very strangeness. Adorno couture!
In this way The Devil Wears Prada is pure laine standard, although broadened by its also-ran status as a make-over film (or rather, a tautological literalizing of the make-over genre through a field that represents the very means of making-over). None-and-nevertheless, the central tropes of the fashion-movie remain mostly unchallenged, unchanged, and the same, all the while maintaining an expository flash of inspiration that forever reappears with the intermittent scenes involving a gaggle of photographers illuminating their subjects with blinding lights and strobes. An overt-rhetorical spectacle that, in effect, doubles the industrial terms of its production, and makes visibly real the strange logic of strange subjects captured by the light of photographers who are collectively lit by the cinematic apparatus. Or so it goes: a spectacle operating within a spectacle; glamour times glamour; high fashion via mainstream Hollywood; and the vanguard made common.
