Summary
In a chandeliered salon that smells of turpentine and tuberoses, a couturier—equal parts Proustian dandy and sweat-shop Faust—promises the Vanity Fair Girls a sartorial apotheosis he has no time to deliver. Instead he swathes them in uncut serge and chiffon, fastening the phantom gowns with nothing but glass-headed pins that tremble like guilty secrets. Each breath, each sideways glance, looses a silvery hail; fabric slides off shoulder-blades the way snow abandons a roof-ridge at dawn. Into this slow-motion strip-tease stumbles Eddie, a pint-sized tailor’s apprentice armed with the reflexes of a card-sharp and the gallantry of a Bowery bouncer, dashing between marble nudes and champagne coupes to re-robe the mannequins before society dowagers can gasp, before flash-powder can ignite. The film becomes a fugue of disrobing: a shoulder here, a flank there, until the reception itself—intended to crown the artist who painted the girls—turns into living collage, canvas and couture collapsing into one giggling, blushing, ever-moving bas-relief.
Synopsis
The Vanity Fair Girls appear as models and attend an artist's reception gowned in the latest creations of a famous designer. The designer hasn't had time to make the dresses, so he merely pins a lot of material in drapes and folds around the young ladies. The pins keep coming out and the girls lose their dresses at embarrassing moments. Eddie gets the job of attempting to re-pin their clothes on with remarkable speed.
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