Film Review: Dressed

David Swajeski's documentary Dressed focuses on young Laotian-American designer Nary Manivong as he prepares for his first big fashion show in New York City, while presenting a quick overview of the fashion industry today and the challenges it presents to the armies of ambitious aspirants dreaming of having their own successful label.

For many of these aspirants, a definite reality check is offered by a number of Swajeski's fashion-insider interview subjects. Particularly informative and well-versed is Lynn Yeager, who, with her abbreviated Louise Brooks bob and pixie-clown makeup, is one of the scene's foremost visual eccentrics. A fashionista in the truest sense of the word, she observes that the glamorous rock/movie-star-like fantasy of being a designer is just that, a fantasy, in "a very cutthroat, back-stabby, weird little business" that demands unrelenting hard work and "is very jinx-y," where highly talented designers fail while well-connected mediocrities stay in business. It can all come down to the "success" that happens when you get that dreamed-of (but impossible) order from Saks Fifth Avenue for 1,000 pairs of a trouser you made from the end of a bolt of material you found on 14th Street. "Being a butcher would be more glamorous," she avers.

For Manivong, these challenges are multiplied given his background, from a homeless teenager in Columbus, Ohio, to his ongoing New York struggles with finance and gaining recognition in an already overpopulated industry. To finance his collection, he works two jobs and lives rent-free through the kindness of a friend who lets him crash at her place. As the clock ticks down to showtime, he is faced with horrendous problems, like the venue for his show—which is costing him double what he had envisioned—cancelling him at the last minute and his manufacturer refusing to release his garments until they are paid for in toto. It's a real hair-raiser, with a happy ending when his high-school principal, who always believed in him (and cites the sober fact of the paucity of students graduating these days, especially without proper family structure), comes through with the money.

Manivong has evidently gone on to further success and his story is an inspiring one, but Swajeski lingers too artfully long on pensive close-ups of his handsome face while recounting his struggle, and after a while the themes of the hardships of the business and the necessity of believing in yourself become repetitive. And not all of the industry experts interviewed are as trenchant as Yeager, although designer Nanette Lepore is bracingly realistic about the success she has managed to attain.

Early on, we see Manivong perusing the Internet for trends which will inform his design sensibility, which gave me a rather sinking feeling about how such "necessary" awareness of a commercial point of view can stifle real creativity. This is brought home when his collection is finally viewed, as it is decidedly underwhelming in terms of line and color, at once too respectively derivative and unappetizing. Swajeski's busy camerawork here, offering only long shots and quickly intercut close-ups of the garments which avert close study, almost seems complicit in an attempt to camouflage these weaknesses.

Over the end credits, we are shown Manivong's progress over a couple of years to the present time, as he celebrates with no less than Tommy Hilfiger, a designer who represents everything one can say about commerce over talent. Manivong's most recent work appears to be more interesting, but unfortunately we only get a flash of it.