A rich seam in cinema : How do filmmakers pull off a successful fashion biopic?

As the intrigue around ‘House Of Gucci’ grows, we look at the success formula filmmakers leverage in order to pull off a rivetting and effective fashion biopic film

Gone are the days of fashion biopics being merely fever dreams of fabrics thrown about, camera flashes, sun-seeking parties and excesses of cash flow. From the more reverential Coco Avant Chanel (2009) to the darkly superfluous Greed (2019), the lens of fashion biopics over the years has been switched out for something more unflinching and less insipid.

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But why do we care so much? The world of fashion may be one far removed from our own reality and this in itself elevates a sense of intrigue, escapism and attachment. Dennis Bingham, in his 2010 book Whose Lives Are They Anyway? sums it up fairly succinctly: “So as to plumb that mystery of humanness, the inability completely to know another person, and the absolute importance of knowing them and ourselves.”