Initially, The September Issue comes off as something like the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

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A film about the world’s greatest living couturier would have to work overtime in order to not be beautiful, but Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor manages to find a certain poetics behind the eye candy. Where Unzipped––to my mind the last great fashion documentary––was heavily invested in a kind of designer-as-tortured artist schematics that inevitably could only resolve themselves, competition doc-style, in a final runway show, Valentino is both a more surface-oriented portrait of a man and a deeper examination of the changing politics of the luxury industry.

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An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:

Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.

I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!

The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.

UPDATE: There are many, many more photos from inside the exhibit on Flickr.

David Lynch has partnered with shoe world god Christian Louboutin to promote a special, very limited edition of ladies’ footwear. Appropriately titled “Fetish”, the project started out as a photo essay by Lynch, documenting an extremely serious pair of Louboutin heels. After unveiling the images at Paris Fashion Week, Lynch and Louboutin developed five sets of shoes, as well as five sets of prints of Lynch’s photographs of otherwise-naked models wearing the shoes, to sell to collectors. Louboutin creepily described the collaboration thusly:

The models wore these unwearable shoes with natural grace. Their very white skin, very dark eyes and bright mouths melded with Lynch’s aesthetics…As is his habit, David Lynch made it into a décor populated with shadows.

More “Fetish” images here and here. Via Shake Well Before Use.

I Watch Stuff offers a roll of the eyes towards the above Gucci advert directed by David Lynch: “This minute of models doing what must be the waifish equivalent of dancing (swaying gently with passing breezes) to the tune of ‘Heart of Glass,’ all I could think was, ‘Oh god, was there a time when David Lynch would dance to Blondie?’” But it’s not surprise to see Lynch indulging in pop music–he stole that shtick from Kenneth Anger twenty years ago, and has often wavered on the ironic/sincere line with it.

To me, the ad falls in with the recent trend of corporations paying brand-name directors to rehash chunks of their film work within the context of an advertisement. The Gucci ad plays like the last scene of Inland Empire, stripped of the feeling of catharsis provided by that film’s previous two hours and forty minutes, with Nina Simone swapped out for Blondie and with a lot more money to play with. In some ways, this feels like what Lynch has been working towards for years: it’s a chance for him to experiment with mood and visual atmosphere without having to worry about assigning meaning to anything.