Fashion, Fame, and the Cost of Identity: How Alice Winocour’s Couture Falls Short of the Great Fashion Films
Alice Winocour’s Couture (2025), starring Angelina Jolie, sets out to combine intimate personal drama with the seductive world of haute couture. It is an ambitious premise that ultimately fails to fulfill its considerable potential. Rather than offering a compelling exploration of fashion as a cultural force or a penetrating character study, the film remains caught between the two, never fully committing to either. What remains is a visually elegant but emotionally distant work whose greatest—and almost only—lasting achievement is Angelina Jolie’s remarkably honest performance.
Set during Paris Fashion Week, the film follows the intersecting lives of three women from vastly different cultural and social backgrounds. Maxine Walker (Angelina Jolie), an American filmmaker, arrives in Paris while directing a short film about a female vampire, only to find herself confronting the collapse of her own personal life. Ada (Anyier Anei), an eighteen-year-old refugee from South Sudan, hopes modeling will lift her family out of poverty despite her dream of studying pharmacy. Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a French makeup artist, quietly struggles with dissatisfaction and the desire to reinvent herself.
Each of these women possesses the potential to carry an entire feature on her own. Unfortunately, Winocour divides her attention among all three without granting any of them the emotional depth necessary to become fully realized individuals. Their journeys remain fragmented, their conflicts underdeveloped, and their emotional transformations largely absent. Instead of converging into a meaningful dramatic whole, the three narratives move alongside one another without generating genuine dramatic momentum.
Maxine is by far the film’s most compelling character. While directing her film, she faces an impending divorce, an increasingly fractured relationship with her teenage daughter, and the devastating discovery that she has breast cancer. These circumstances give Angelina Jolie an opportunity to deliver one of the most intimate performances of her career. Her portrayal is remarkably restrained, free of theatricality or emotional manipulation. Jolie communicates grief, exhaustion, resilience, and quiet dignity through the smallest gestures and expressions. She does not simply perform Maxine—she inhabits her. Given Jolie’s own well-documented personal experiences with preventive breast surgery and family trauma, the performance carries an unmistakable authenticity that transcends the screenplay itself.
Ada’s story promises an equally compelling emotional conflict. Having escaped war and displacement, she now finds herself trapped between education and economic survival. Her struggle could have become a powerful reflection on the difficult choices confronting an entire generation of young women. Instead, the screenplay reduces these complexities to broad outlines. The emotional stakes remain underdeveloped, and despite Anyier Anei’s sincerity, the character never achieves the psychological richness she deserves.
Angèle fares no better. Although hints of emotional dissatisfaction and inner conflict emerge throughout the film, they remain largely unexplored. Her storyline feels incomplete, existing more as a narrative suggestion than a fully realized dramatic arc.
The film’s central weakness lies not in its ideas but in its execution. Couture wishes to explore identity, ambition, motherhood, illness, migration, beauty, and the cost of success—all within the framework of Paris Fashion Week. Yet none of these themes is examined with sufficient depth. Rather than illuminating the psychological realities hidden beneath the glamorous façade of fashion, the film becomes fascinated by the surface itself.
Fashion shows, backstage corridors, makeup rooms, designer gowns, and carefully choreographed runways dominate the screen. These images are undeniably beautiful, yet they rarely function as meaningful storytelling devices. Instead, they become decorative tableaux that gradually distance the audience from the emotional lives of the characters.
One of the defining characteristics of the fashion industry is the tension between appearance and reality. Behind every perfect image lies insecurity, sacrifice, competition, and loneliness. Surprisingly, Couture never fully embraces this contradiction. Its characters repeatedly discuss emotional pressure, public expectations, and the price of success, yet these ideas remain confined to dialogue rather than being expressed through dramatic action.
Winocour’s direction also relies heavily on silence and prolonged observation. Silence in cinema can be profoundly expressive when it reveals emotional truths that words cannot. Here, however, too many contemplative moments merely slow the narrative without enriching it. The deliberate pacing gradually becomes inertia, leaving the film emotionally static.
Visually, however, Couture is often impressive. The cinematography captures Paris with cool precision rather than romantic nostalgia. This is not the city of dreams but a landscape of emotional isolation, where beauty and loneliness coexist beneath immaculate surfaces. The carefully composed frames, refined production design, and exquisite costumes give the film an undeniable visual sophistication. Ironically, the atmosphere often proves more compelling than the narrative itself.
If Couture ultimately disappoints, it is because it never transforms its intriguing ideas into a coherent dramatic experience. Had Winocour concentrated on a single protagonist instead of dispersing her attention among three separate stories, the result might have been considerably more powerful.
Fashion on Film: Better Journeys Through the Same World
Cinema has frequently explored fashion with far greater emotional and dramatic success.
Among the finest examples is Gia (1998), the powerful biographical drama chronicling the life of Gia Carangi, one of America’s first supermodels. More than a story about fame, it is an intimate portrait of loneliness, addiction, vulnerability, and emotional collapse. Rather than sensationalizing Gia’s tragedy, the film invites viewers to understand the human being behind the public image.
Once again, Angelina Jolie delivers an extraordinary performance. Her portrayal balances defiance, fragility, passion, and despair with remarkable precision, creating one of the defining performances of her career. Unlike Couture, Gia never loses sight of its emotional center. Long after the film ends, its portrait of a woman destroyed by fame continues to resonate.
Ironically, the greatest strength shared by both films is Angelina Jolie herself. In Couture, she brings emotional honesty to material that rarely deserves her commitment. Her performance alone justifies seeing the film.
Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), starring Audrey Hepburn, represents an entirely different vision of fashion. It is less concerned with the industry’s darker realities than with its elegance, romance, and artistic beauty. Yet beneath its delightful musical exterior lies an intelligent examination of the relationship between intellect and appearance.
Hepburn’s Jo Stockton is not the stereotypical fashion model. She is an intellectual, an avid reader, and a philosophy enthusiast unexpectedly swept into the glamorous world of haute couture. The film contrasts culture and commerce, individuality and public image, while celebrating Paris as the world’s fashion capital.
Visually, Funny Face remains one of the most beautiful fashion films ever made. Influenced significantly by photographer Richard Avedon, its compositions, costumes, and Parisian locations continue to inspire fashion photography today. More than a film about fashion, Funny Face became part of fashion history itself.
Equally compelling is Coco Before Chanel (2009), a thoughtful portrait of Gabrielle Chanel before she became an icon. Rather than celebrating glamour, the film explores the difficult process through which an impoverished orphan reinvented both herself and women’s fashion.
Audrey Tautou gives a restrained, deeply human performance, portraying Chanel not as a legend but as an ambitious woman shaped by loneliness, hardship, and determination. The film’s understated visual style perfectly complements Chanel’s own minimalist philosophy.
Although the film occasionally romanticizes its subject while avoiding some of the more controversial aspects of Chanel’s later life, it remains an elegant meditation on identity, creativity, and perseverance.
No discussion of fashion cinema would be complete without The Devil Wears Prada (2006), one of the defining films ever made about the fashion industry. Beneath its wit and glamour lies a sharp examination of power, ambition, media, and the sacrifices demanded by professional success.
Meryl Streep’s unforgettable Miranda Priestly remains one of contemporary cinema’s most iconic characters—simultaneously intimidating, admirable, and endlessly fascinating. Rather than reducing fashion to superficial spectacle, the film reveals it as a fiercely competitive world governed by relentless expectations.
Its long-awaited sequel, released in early 2026, revisits these characters within the radically transformed media landscape of the digital age. While it never quite recaptures the freshness of the original and occasionally leans too heavily on nostalgia, it offers an intelligent reflection on changing journalism, fashion publishing, and the passage of time. The reunion of Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway remains its greatest pleasure.
Ultimately, Coco Before Chanel is an elegant portrait of a woman courageous enough to redefine her era. Gia reveals the hidden wounds beneath fame. Funny Face celebrates fashion as romance and artistic fantasy. The Devil Wears Prada remains the definitive cinematic exploration of power within the fashion industry, while its sequel reflects on how that world has evolved.
Couture, however, never truly becomes a film about fashion. Instead, it attempts to tell the stories of three women whose lives briefly intersect against the backdrop of Paris Fashion Week. Unfortunately, those stories remain both emotionally superficial and structurally fragmented. Despite its visual elegance and Angelina Jolie’s deeply affecting performance, Couture ultimately fades from memory soon after the credits roll.
