Strike a pose: The best fashion movies to get you prepped for Devil Wears Prada 2

It’s a special couple of weeks for fashion lovers with the convergence of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and next week’s Met Gala.

Gird your loins. Miranda Priestly’s sharp eye and tongue combined with Patricia Field protégé Molly Rogers’ costume design will surely give all the fashun girlies euphoric highs, which can be carried straight into the Met’s glam carpet show.

Expect gorgeous fabrics, sculptural designs, and an appreciation for an artform too often dismissed as frivolous or superficial. Fashion is art, or at least fashion can be art when it’s not a piece of unethical fast “fashion” fire hazard coming from Shein or Temu.

If you’ve already rewatched The Devil Wears Prada in preparation – because, of course you have – then get your sartorial jollies on with these great films set in the fabulous world of la mode.

PRET-A-PORTER

Filmmaker Robert Altman was a master at pulling together all the different personalities that make up a specific world, and in 1994, he turned his eye to Paris Fashion Week.

With an enormous ensemble that included Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, Julia Roberts, Marcello Mastroianni, Kim Basinger, Tracey Ullman and Forest Whitaker, Altman took audiences into the chaos, high stakes, pettiness and intrigue of the fashion world’s most watched event.

There are rival designers secretly in love, fashion editors vying for the same star photographer, journalists on assignment who never make it out of their hotel room, French labels being sold to American bootmakers. It’s a swirl of activity, plus a good, old-fashioned death that isn’t what it seems.

With a ton of appearances from real-world industry figures including Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Gianfranco Ferre, Issey Miyaki, Linda Evangelista, Christian Lacroix and Helena Christensen, no one but Altman has managed to capture the insanity of Paris Fashion Week.

Watch: Digital rental

THE FIRST MONDAY IN MAY

When the Met Gala was established in 1948 as a fundraiser for the museum’s Costume Institute, those founders were unlikely to have imagined it as a global force in fashion and celebrity that went far beyond its initial confines of New York City high society.

This 2016 documentary is a revealing if not exactly challenging look into what it takes to mount the event, focused on the 2015 edition.

What The First Monday in May does really well is it expands the lens to really take in the real purpose of the Met Gala, which is to raise money and to draw attention to the work of the Costume Institute in attempting to elevate art to the same levels as the Renaissance paintings and Roman sculptures that hold pride of place at the Met.

That year, the exhibit was China: Through the Looking Glass, and the documentary follows curator Andrew Bolton (as well as, of course, Anna Wintour) as the team put together a remarkable display. It does raise, although not interrogate, questions of orientalism in China’s influence on western fashion.

It spends more time on the exhibit than it does on the celebrities, but there are still some titbits, such as Josh Hartnett deemed not relevant enough to attend, or Chloe Sevigny being sacrificed to the dud table.

Watch: DocPlay, Beama and digital rental

PHANTOM THREAD

It’s hard to pick out Phantom Thread as one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s best works when you could apply to almost his entire filmography. Jonny Greenwood’s luxurious score alone would put this up there.

Set in 1950s London, it stars Daniel Day Lewis as fictional designer Reynolds Woodcock, a creative genius but a mercurial one with what one could generously classify as an artistic temperament. He’s very exacting and controlling, and doesn’t love it when things aren’t as meticulous as his gowns.

There are romanticised scenes of creation – scissors slicing through fabric, billowing silks, drawings comes to life and the buzz and activity of a busy atelier. But the core of the film is this complex romance between Reynolds and a woman (Vicky Krieps) he meets who becomes his muse, lover and the one person who will hold him accountable.

Watch: SBS On Demand

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

This documentary about the inside workings of Vogue US as it puts together its famed bumper September issue if The Devil Wears Prada hadn’t been such a hit the year before the cameras invaded the magazine’s offices.

From expensive photo shoots that may or may not make it into the issue to questions over Sienna Miller’s hair, plus sales meetings, run-throughs with racks and racks of clothes, and rendezvous with designers and photographers, this is catnip for anyone who’s ever picked up a copy of Vogue and wondered, how.

You get a sense of an Anna Wintour that is both herself (she’s not warm and fuzzy and that’s OK) and a little bit held back because of the exposure, while you empathise with creative director Grace Coddington as she keeps fighting for her photos.

This is such an interesting companion piece to Devil Wears Prada 2, because the sequel will deal with the contractions that has beset the publishing industry versus where it was two decades earlier.

The September 2007 issue of Vogue, the subject of this doco, was 840 pages thick. Last year, the same signature edition was less than half that at 380.

Watch: DocPlay, Beama and digital rental

OCEAN’S 8

Ocean’s Eight is obviously more of a heist movie than it is a fashion movie, but it certainly serves well as a taster to the Met Gala next week. And it’s a bit of a trifle, and the frothy confection of it all is always a bit of fun.

With a delectable ensemble of Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter, Mindy Kaling, Rihanna (who to this day still reigns as the most memorable Met Gala gown with that marigold Guo Pei dress in 2015), Awkwafina and Sarah Paulson, the action of Ocean’s 8 takes place at the famed event.

You get a different side to the Met Gala than in The First Monday in May documentary in that it takes a look at how a celebrity’s outfit is put together – played here by Anne Hathaway as the egomaniacal but cluey Daphne Kruger – and the role of brands and designers in being part of that story.

Watch: Netflix, Stan, HBO Max

DIOR AND I

There are heaps of documentaries dedicated to a single designer and their artistic visions (Westwood: Punk. Icon. Activist, Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards, Dries, Valentino: The Last Emperor and so on) but Dior and I stands out because this isn’t a traditional biography (there’s an Apple TV series, The New Look, that does that, with Ben Mendelsohn in the role).

What makes Dior and I distinct is that it follows Belgian designer Raf Simons as he creates his first haute couture collection after he is appointed to lead the legendary Paris fashion house, and he has only eight weeks to do it.

Simons is not a natural choice – he’s been considered as more of a minimalist designer – so it’s about marrying his own creative instincts with the legacy of Christian Dior.

Most interestingly, the film spends almost as much time with the workers in the atelier, some of whom have been there for four decades, as they race to complete the collection. It’s rare to give that much focus to those who lovingly make the fashion rather than the big names who design them.

Watch: DocPlay, Beama and digital rental

THE DRESSMAKER

There are revenge dresses and then there are revenge dresses. The Dressmaker is all about the latter as Kate Winslet’s Tilly returns to her small and small-minded hometown in Victoria, circa 1950s.

Her creations are gorgeous and it’s not long before the rest of the town notices and wants to be dressed by Tilly. Confidence and style come to Dungatar, but so does secrets, lies and vengeance.

Tilly was sent away when she was 10 years old, blamed for the death of a classmate. But there’s a lot more to that story than she remembers (which is not much), and certainly much more than those with much to hide ever want revealed.

A cracker Australian cast joined Winslet and her very good local accent, including Sarah Snook, Hugo Weaving, Barry Otto, Judy Davis and a hunky Liam Hemsworth.

But the real star of the film are the luscious period costumes by Marion Boyce.

Watch: Digital rental

MCQUEEN

If there’s one designer-focused documentary to watch, it’s McQueen, the 2018 biographical project about avant garde wunderkind Alexander McQueen.

The film charts the British designer’s rise as an imaginative singular talent who started his artistic journey as a chubby kid from London’s East End through his apprenticeship on Saville Row, and being discovered by fashion editor Isabella Blow at a student fashion show.

McQueen’s sartorial creations were undeniably works of art as he experimented with form and pushed the boundaries of what the industry would accept. Convention was the enemy of imagination.

Taking over the reins at Givenchy at only 27 years old, he went on to change the industry in how it viewed itself and the possibilities of creativity in fashion.

Given McQueen ended his own life at the age of 40, the film only skims the demons that plagued his soul, and is a light touch when it comes to his HIV diagnosis, his drug use, depression and eventual falling out with Blow.

Still, just to marvel at his work is a gift.

Watch: ABC iview, DocPlay, Beama and Stan

BILL CUNNINGHAM: NEW YORK

Fashion is often seen as the domain of the elite where decisions are made by the likes of Anna Wintour, highly paid designers and the buyers of uptown stores. But photographer Bill Cunningham’s aperture was much wider than that.

Cunningham was already known for his candid photographs of people whose style he found interesting on the streets of New York, and writing for the likes of Women’s Wear Daily, when he was hired by the town’s venerated paper of record in 1978.

Over the next decades, he was a fixture around New York, zipping past in his Schwinn bike, a camera strapped to his body as he sought to see what others didn’t, which is that style and fashion are everywhere.

Watch: DocPlay, Beama and digital rental