“A purchase on the horizon, a panoply of temptation, the hesitation in your voice, soon to be an echo in the recesses of the spheres of retail.” Who could resist such seductively florid sales patter? Certainly not Marianne Jean-Baptiste in In Fabric, the latest, laudably bonkers movie by Peter Strickland. Ignoring the sales assistant’s vampiric demeanour, Jean-Baptiste falls in love with the dress she tries on (colour: “artery red”), only to find it is a haunted garment that inflicts upon its wearers pain, suffering and a nasty rash.
Like so many before her, Jean-Baptiste is a literal fashion victim; a woman who pays the price for seeking to make herself look better. It is a notion that harks back to fairytales and pulp horror fiction, and – by the look of things – is still very much in vogue. Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 The Red Shoes is the textbook example: the Faustian footwear brings no joy for ballerina Moira Shearer in life or art. In Fabric also brings to mind Tobe “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” Hooper’s little-seen I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990), in which a red dress made from cursed Aztec fabric turns the women who wear it into wanton psycho killers.
But most of all, Strickland’s movie harks back to the classic Italian horrors, which were never knowingly under-styled, especially when it came to womenswear. Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964) sees a serial killer picking off fashion models, while red shoes again play a part in Dario Argento’s 1982 movie Tenebrae. It was a golden age of male directors dressing women up then watching then get violently murdered, although in retrospect, the whole giallo genre looks like a fashion mood board.
The associations between women, beauty, fashion and horror still run deep. Look at The Neon Demon, where Elle Fanning’s ingenue model is eaten up by predatory lesbian fashionistas. Coming soon is Justin Simien’s horror satire Bad Hair, described as “the story of an ambitious young woman working in the image-obsessed world of music television who gets a weave that may have a mind of its own”. Simien admitted he got the idea from a Korean horror movie called The Wig. “This is my way of writing a love letter about all of the BS that black women have to go through,” he said last year.
To its credit, In Fabric puts a more contemporary spin on things. The cursed dress is worn by a man at one stage, for starters. This being a Peter Strickland movie, nothing is clear cut, everything looks fabulous, and it’s much funnier than it sounds. “I just wanted to explore people’s neurotic connection with clothing,” he explained in a recent interview. That is clearly an ongoing concern. Perhaps his next move should be a remake of The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants?
In Fabric is in cinemas from Friday 28 June
