Pinning It On

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.