Ready to Wear/Prêt-à-Porter (1994) - The Paris fashion week through the Altman lens

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Danish supermodel Helene Christensen sells the film with her beauty but goes uncredited on this poster for Robert Altman's Ready to Wear

Fashion week in Paris: Kitty is a TV personality there to cover the stories: A hated fashion boss suffocates in a sandwich, - but the press screams that it must be murder. Meanwhile the shows take place, the magazine editors schmooze over an Irish photographer, and two foreigners share a room in an over-booked hotel.

 

Ready to Wear is written by Barbara Shulgasser and co-writer/producer/director, Missourian master filmmaker Robert Altman (The Delinquents (1957)), whose 29th feature it was. The North-American title is a literal translation of the French fashion term that was the title in most of the rest of the world.

Though widely discarded critically, this scathing Altman look at the fashion world is an urbane, bubbly, light dish filled with great clothes and beautiful people. There's fun with cinema icons Sophia Loren (Arabesque (1966)) and Marcello Mastroianni (8½ (1963)) among loads of other stuff in this star-stuffed film that features plenty of slaps and appropriately shallow cheek kisses to the fashion industry.

 

Related posts:

Robert Altman: The Company (2003) - Campbell, Turner and Altman's fine ballet picture  

Gosford Park (2001) - Smith triumphs in Altman & Fellowes' exquisite whodunit 

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: 18 mil. $

Box office: 46.8 mil. $

= Box office success (returned 2.6 times its cost)

[Ready to Wear premiered 23 December (New York) and runs 133 minutes. Altman had the idea for the film after attending a Sonia Rykiel fashion show in Paris in 1984 with his wife, commenting: "I couldn't believe what I saw. It was such a circus. It was just too theatrical not to want to film". Shooting took place from March - May 1994 in the US, Paris, France and in Moscow, Russia. The film opened #14 to a 2 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it peaked the following weekend at #13, grossing 11.3 mil. $ (24.1 % of the total gross). It was nominated for 2 Golden Globes and won a National Board of Review award, among other honors. Roger Ebert gave it a 2.5/4 star review, translating to a notch under this one. Altman returned with Kansas City (1996). Mastroianni returned in One Hundred and One Nights/Les Cent et Une Nuits de Simon Cinéma (1995); Loren in Grumpier Old Men (1995). Ready to Wear is rotten at 24 % with a 4.70/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

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