Ensemble presents... Funny Face with guest curator Karen Walker
Join designer Karen Walker for a special screening of the fashion classic, at The Hollywood in Avondale, Tāmaki Makaurau, on Wednesday September 28. Chosen by Karen Walker, this is the first of Ensemble's monthly film nights curated by special guests. Ensemble Members attend free but tickets are available to all to purchase here. For more on our value laden membership program, click right here.
“Banish the black, burn the blue, and bury the beige. From now on, girls, Think pink! Red is dead, blue is through, green's obscene, brown's taboo. And there is not the slightest excuse for plum, or puce or chartreuse - Think pink!"
Is there a more perfect opening scene than that of Funny Face, a riot of colour, music and over the top declarations about trends that lovingly celebrates and pokes fun at the foibles and thrill of fashion.
The 1957 musical film, starring the iconic pairing of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, opens at the office of Quality magazine, with editor Maggie Prescott bemoaning the dull state of fashion and declaring the new trend that will feature throughout the next issue and beyond: pink! The scene is a visual delight, every still presented as an art-directed fashion photo - using the images of Richard Avedon (also iconic) - and a hint at the fashion parade to come.
Hepburn is at her most Hepburn-ish in the film (more so than Breakfast at Tiffany’s, imo), playing the intellectual and charming Greenwich Village bookstore clerk Jo Stockton. It’s at the bookstore, during a fashion shoot where their crew takes over, that Maggie and Astaire’s fashion photographer Dick Avery ‘discover’ their new face of thinking fashion who will revolutionise the pages of their magazine.
“Are there no models who think as well as they look?” asks Maggie, who is based on the iconic editor Diana Vreeland. They find her in Jo, who dreams of visiting Paris to attend a famous professor’s lectures on empathicalism, but instead ends up in the city of lights for fashion.
From start to finish, there is almost too much magical fashion to cope with. From Sandy in Grease to Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, I’ve always thought that pre-makeover characters are actually way cooler (reject patriarchal expectations! Also, their outfits are just more my vibe) and so too here with smart girl Jo. Her high-fashion, photo shoot makeover features a parade of Givenchy couture so of course it is divine, but her bookish charm is perfection in a tweed pinafore at the bookstore, a perfect camel coat on arrival in Paris, and in Beatnik black pants flats, and a polo neck at the jazz club.
The costumes are largely by the (iconic) costume designer Edith Head, with the fashion shoot sequences featuring ensembles by Hepburn’s regular collaborator Givenchy. The final scene features a dress so dreamy that it inspired the wedding dress of Zoe Kravitz.
It is a musical, but don’t let that put you off. Some of the songs are by Gershwin and as well as Fashion, capital F, it features some zinger one-liners that show up the absurdity and pretensions of both fashion, and those who turn their nose up at it.
And so I leave you with one of my many favourite quotes from the film, uttered by Hepburn as Jo in her chaotic bookstore: “She doesn't approve of fashion magazines. It's chichi and an unrealistic approach to self-impressions as well as economics.”
