Pretty Good

Better Late Then Never

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

I'm a sucker for fashion films, fiction or fact, from the bad, remember 'ready to wear'? to the brilliant 'Dior and me'. I've seen them all. Fashion TV and YouTube catwalk shows...I'm an addict. This is good, but not great. Dries van Noten is polite and as organised as an accountant. His house is beautiful, he loves his better half and his dog. He claims to be about 'the craft' but we never see 'les petites mains' who actually make the clothes, we see a lot of the finished garments on models (Alyssa Sutherland in a 2002 show: As an Aussie, she is a star!) We don't find out what makes Mr van Noten tick, let along create. Nevertheless, this gives you and me an insight into a quiet achiever, with none of the flash and eccentricity of Valantino or Lagerfeld, and Iris Apfel, a wonderful eccentric, gives him credit and validates that modern fashion is a conveyor belt and that designers do better as independents. But I still don't feel I learnt what fires up Dries van Noten.