Documenting Fashion: Capturing Beauty
The documenting of fashion isn’t just about covering various brands and their seasonal lines shown on catwalks. Models parading pieces of art—as beautiful mannequins in motion—is but the surface of the fashion world.
Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash
Our point of view in creating this fashion documentary is what will set us apart in the telling of this story of a famous fashion retailer. Our intent is to move viewers beyond the traditional runway world of glitz and glamour; to take the audience on a journey of how the fashion industry has become what it is today and how this family laid the foundation for pioneers in modern fashion design.
From New York to Paris, Antwerp and Tokyo, we’ll show the audience the progression of style and trends and the variables of all that was New York and the fashion industry since the late 1960s, never quite depicted in a fashion documentary in this way. We’ll tap into the processes of the industry, and what it takes to create the designs of the garments, the presentations to retailers (the Fashion Weeks held across the globe); and decipher the endless decisions made at fashion magazine editorial meetings and photo shoots, the selling of the luxury lifestyle to the public…
Our hope is to show a layered, relatable world in which audiences decide what “clothing” means to them, we will express our objective—to portray a realistic vision of an extraordinary family fashion business; an homage to Charivari, New York.
Tonally, this stylized documentary should feel like a melding between Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s, and the down-to-Earth realism of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth with the visual beauty of Tom Fords “A Single Man”. The “usual suspects” of designers, fashionistas and celebrities will be presented equally with historic detail, and personal stories of the people behind Charivari—its owners, employees and regular customers; some forging far reaching career paths in the fashion industry and beyond.
To document Charivari is also to include the designers and photographers the family supported—what moved them and inspired their creativity to produce work in their unique vision and composition of light, color and focus, capturing beauty
Seldom do audiences have the opportunity to see the full scope of the fashion industry depicted on screen. And in the case of our film, CHARIVARI a fashion UPROAR, how during that period of time and circumstance in New York city’s history presented the opportunity for the talented family to build such a company, which has influenced the very clothing people wear on the street today, almost two decades after Charivari closed its doors.