The Devil Wears Prada opens nationwide this weekend, but already some fashion insiders (perhaps those who weren't asked to advise on the film?) are already grousing about the clothes worn by the fashionistas who work at the fictional Runway magazine.
"Where is the chic?" groused David Wolfe, a New York fashion and retail consultant well versed in the eccentricities of real-life magazine divas. In his assessment, the film's stylistic problems begin with Meryl Streep as the silver-coiffed Miranda, a character he thinks looks far too bland and bankerlike and ugh! — far too pretty — to be convincing as Runway's chilly commander in chief.
In fashion, "You've gotta have a gimmick, like the stripper said," Mr. Wolfe observed. Think, he urged, of the rigidly stylized signature look of magazine legends like Diana Vreeland, with her kabuki makeup and tar-colored hair, or celebrity editors like Anna Wintour, whose dark glasses and precision-cut bangs shield a profile of cut glass.
"In a world of 'fabulous,' " Mr. Wolfe pronounced, " 'pretty' just isn't good enough."
Other self-appointed critics pin "Devil's" visual shortcomings on a misapprehension of what truly counts as "fabulous" in the realm of style. It is not summed up by a parade of Gucci, Pucci, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada, they say, but by breezier labels like Chloé, Marc Jacobs and Marni, which are coveted by young trendsetters but are in scant evidence on screen.
Even Prada is in short supply. In their place are masses of wool bouclé power suits, double-C logo pearls, tweed newsboy caps and thigh-high boots that threaten to sink the film under their weight.
Those costumes are "a caricature of what people who don't work in fashion think fashion people look like," said Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle. Conceived and styled by Patricia Field, who assembled the wardrobe for "Sex and the City," "the clothes are a little too head-to-toe perfect," Ms. Slowey said.
The film's stylist, Patricia Field, who made fashion history with her fabulous wardrobe for Sex in the City hit back at critics by saying that she wasn't making a documentary, she was making a feature film. She clearly implied that the sniping fashion know-it-alls wouldn't know Fabulous Film Style if it knocked them upside their asymetrically bobbed heads. Or something like that.
