Thursday Movie Picks: Fashion World

It's the second Thursday of 2017, but my first entry in Thursday Movie Picks. Sorry to our host of this weekly event, Wanderer at Wandering Through the Shelves, but I'm fashionably late. Ha! Fashionably late. I kill me. Why? We're talking about fashion, that's why. Seriously speaking, it's something that's important to us all, on some level. Even people who claim not to care go out of their way to look like they don't care. Those people also make sure their look is right on those occasions when they need to look decent. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know much of my wardrobe consists of graphic tees, mostly of the superhero variety. What you probably don't know is I often wear suits, too. And I'm pretty meticulous about them. That's it for me - jeans and a tee, or a suit and tie. Anything in between is inconsequential.

As the topic suggests, movies venture into the fashion world, too. Some movies are explicitly about the fashion world while others are merely fashionable. I am assuming we're supposed to choose the former. So that's what I did.

Legendary singer Diana Ross takes on the role of Tracy, a young girl who dreams of making it big as a fashion designer. She eventually becomes a big time model and has a tumultuous love affair with Lando Calrissian Billy Dee Williams. The movie as a whole is a bit kooky, and certainly on the melodramatic side, but Ross makes it worth the price of admission. The shadow cast by her real life singing career is so large it's made her acting career nearly forgotten despite the fact she was Oscar nominated for her work in Lady Sings the Blues, a few years before this film. She brings it, again. And yes, that's Norman Bates Anthony Perkins in the pic.

This documentary is about a thirteen year old girl named Nadya and her handler, Ashley. Ashley hand-plucked Nadya from Siberia and sent her away to Japan to be a model. Nadya's family doesn't really want her to go, but their financial situation dictates they must. From there, we get a rather sad, often disturbing look at a system that is chewing up young girls and spitting them out at an alarming rate. Click here for my full review.

We have another documentary, but one that is a whole lot more fun than my last pick. This one is all about the history of urban fashion starting just before the advent of hip hop in the early 1970s. We start where hip hop started, in the dilapidated streets of the South Bronx. The most important segment is probably the one on Dapper Dan, a fashion icon in the hip hop world, but little known outside of it. What he was doing from his shop in Harlem defined an era, moved high end designers to get him shut down, then steal his ideas. Even Dan keeps it fun, though. He doesn't seem mad about how things went down, at all. Seeing all the fashions of the 70s, 80s, and 90s brought back lots of memories for me, and inspired lots of laughs in my children. I rank it as one of the greatest documentaries about hip hop.