FRÉDÉRIC TCHENG, BETHANN HARDISON: INVISIBLE BEAUTY (2023) E


HARDISON (CENTER, WITH HEADDRESS) AMID YOUNG PROTEGES

Forcing fashion to see in color

This Sundance documentary is a personal, almost diary account of the life and above all the career of the great unknown mover and shaker of black fashion, Bethann Hardison. She came out of Brooklyn to become a leading fashion model. Later, she ran her own diversity-centric agency, which turned out to gather the hottest models in the world. After she walked away from that and came back to find design houses presenting all-white, or merely token, défilées, she became an essential leader combating racism in the fashion industry. Missing, from the film and from Hardison's life: intimacy and.a personal touch, as strongly hinted by her slightly unsatisfactory relationship, as seen here, with her laid back actor son, Kadeem, whose need just to be himself and to be appreciated she seemed too driven to recognize. Nonetheless this is an exhilarating and eye-opening portrait. Heard from, seen, and admired are a glittering array of black fashion stars, including Tyson Beckford, Naomi Campbell and Iman. Numerous other celebrities are heard from, if sometimes briefly, such as Whoopi Goldberg and Fran Lebowitz.

Frédéric Tcheng has already established a strong background in fashion-related documentary, having contributed to Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2012), then followed up his debut feature Dior and I (2014) with Halston (2019). Why he would name-collaborate directly with his subject this time can be explained only when we observe how powerful a figure Hardison evidently was and remains. Her wide-ranging energy seems irresistible. She is the kind of woman who has had many men in her life, but cannot list one as significant. Yet when the heroic-scaled Tyson Beckford thinks of the possibility of losing her, he weeps.

Significantly missing from Hardison's storytellers is the great black designer Willi Smith, who discovered her in 1967 after uncompleted fashion and art studies and a stint in sales in the Garment District; Smith was lost in 1987 when AIDS decimated the fashion world. But there is evocative film footage showing how Hardison and other black models introduced dance moves and circular (instead of straight up-and-down) pacing into fashion modeling presentations.

It is difficult to convey the excitement, glamour, and beauty of the stream of black models who appear one after another in this film to tell their and Bethann's stories. There's a feeling of plenty and richness that's almost unprecedented. And this helps undercut a slight feeling that Mardison herself is so driven and intense that there is in a sense no there there sometimes as a person.

There is an ugly side and a shock to the picture of the fashion world here: it's all-whiteness, its inherent racism. There was a wave of opening up to diversity in the sixties and seventies, on which Hardison rode as a model and then as a powerful agent. But models rapidly come and go. We learn that after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 there came a wave of young Russian models into America who were very white and blonde. We come to see that there was always an impulse toward uniformity among the big couturiers: they liked the models to be invisible, to disappear in sameness. This was an inherent impulse against diversity, against models being different-looking in anything more than a token way. Hence after the Russian white-blonde wave a period of haute couture défilés - of big fashion shows - with one, or no, black model out of dozens of them.

Hardison rejected the idea of political-style demonstrations to oppose the blatant racism of the fashion world. Her historically effective action, shown here, was personally to draft a lengthy statement of the situation and its unacceptability and to send it out to everyone, everywhere. It has eventually, it appears, become evident - though there is argument about this - that presenting all-white fashion shows is a violation of civil rights. In fact it is not clear that the all-whiteness of fashion has been significantly dented. But Bethann Hardison has been a major opponent to this persistently racist trend, and a great unifying leader and den mother for fashion workers of color.

Invisible Beauty, 115 mins., debuted at Sundance in Jan. 2023.; also shown at Sarasota, San Francisco, Montreal, Doclands. US theatrical release by Magnolia Pictures starting Sept. 15, 2023.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.