Fashion Victim

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I don't think my Vogue subscription has lapsed since I was 13. I love fashion, even though I'm hardly a clothes horse and would probably recoil in horror at any real proximity to the industry. But when fashion and documentary collide? Frothy goodness. I am anxiously awaiting my first viewing of Frederick Wiseman's 1983 The Store now available on DVD about the fabled Dallas Neiman Marcus. I have been feeding my frivolity jones in the meantime with more contemporary fashion fixes, like the purported "insider" view of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld in Lagerfeld Confidential, he of the frosted hair, finger bangles and brittle Teutonic air. Andy Warhol had nothing on Lagerfeld's studied aloof, hologram-like cult of personality. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the vivacious, quip-master American hipster designer Marc Jacobs, the subject of a recent French doc, Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton I also reviewed for the New York alternative weekly New York Press.


Fashion it ain't, but for sheer weirdness, if you are in New York from April 9-22 and in the mood for something truly odd, check out the Israeli doc Stalags, reviewed here about the phenomenon of kinky paperbacks produced in Israeli during the Sixties featuring busty, whip-cracking Nazi prison camp guards torturing brawny American and British prisoners of war. The documentary doesn’t adequately explain why the Israeli Stalags authors did such a gender flip, and made women the cold, hard Nazi sadists and made rugged sides of male beefcake the victims of rape and torture. But this strange sub genre of porn, riding the coattails of the Adolf Eichmann trials and the testimony of Nazi sadism and degeneracy it provided, is required viewing for fans of the outré and the bizarre psychological byways of popular culture.

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