From Karl Lagerfeld and Ralph Lauren to catwalk competitions and industry exposés – the best of fashion on TV
- A round-up of the best style offerings on screen, from Lagerfeld’s glamorous life to gritty documentaries that investigate the industry’s damaging impacts
- Young designers sharpen their elbows and their talents in two shows: Netflix’s Next in Fashion and Amazon Prime’s Making the Cut
Soon, Chang Wan-ji and Hsu Hsiu-e, arguably Taiwan’s most (literally) decorated octogenarians, will be the subject of one of those play-by-play documentary series so beloved of the streaming services. The husband-and-wife team’s unique style – which we’ll call Launderette Leftover – could be seen as a riposte to a fashion industry in which the likes of Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Nike and H&M reportedly until recently burned mountains of new, unsold garments every year to maintain a pretence of exclusivity, when they could be clothing the destitute.
Arch, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, this is nevertheless the sort of competitive, elbows-out reality TV that begets some inspired creations in the glare of full-beam bitchiness as the knockout rounds take their toll and the shark pool shrinks.
Featuring experienced designers from around the world, all looking for the break that will make their name – and US$250,000 – the contestants must impress guest adjudicators including Tommy Hilfiger, Phillip Lim and Prabal Gurung. All of which makes it baffling that Next in Fashion is destined to be a one-series wonder. Catch it while you can.
Also tailor-made for our greatest zips compilation is 13-part drama Atelier, another surprising solo-season Netflix triumph that stitches up, albeit in a polite Japanese manner, the fashion industry and the foibles of its wannabe major players – who in this case are in women’s underwear, as it were.
Rather more scathing are fashion industry documentary exposés RiverBlue and The True Cost (both available to download). The former investigates how the dollar-hungry global textiles business has become a catastrophic polluter of rivers – you’ll never take a dip in the Ganges again – but also what can be done to break its toxic grip on millions of lives.
Nor is ethical behaviour any concern of the avaricious corporations in the latter, which reveals why bargain “fast fashion” threads constitute a death sentence for exploited workers in Cambodia, Bangladesh and India.
Those who believe fashion is a euphemism for rampant consumerism can find further evidence in Amazon Prime’s 10-instalment first series of Making the Cut. Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn are in charge of 12 professional designers who must create collections from scratch and exhibit them in places such as Tokyo and Paris. And the real twist? Amazon began selling the clothes online immediately after each episode.
Fashionistas may also cut their viewing cloth with Very Ralph, HBO’s ambitious portrait of the determinedly private Ralph Lauren, and off-the-peg fun in Wig, the channel’s documentary tracing the emergence of drag as a pop-culture art form.
And where would women’s fashion be without storied magazine Vogue? Find out with HBO’s 2012 feature In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye. Strike a pose.
