Newspaper noir: While the City Sleeps

Lobby card for When the City Sleeps (1956), directed by Fritz Lang. Image source: FilmAffinity US

In film noir, we're faced with a world of corruption and evil which leaves no character untouched. The morally compromised protagonist may be an ex-con (Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past (1947)), sleep with his partner's wife (Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941)), or stick his neck out for none of the desperate refugees who crowd into his bar (Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1943)). But he moves through the world abiding by his own hard-won code, although it may lead him into danger or even death. A late Fritz Lang film, While the City Sleeps (1956), takes the morally compromised protagonist to new depths.

A killer is stalking women in New York City. A librarian and a schoolteacher—symbols of vulnerable single womanhood—have been found brutally murdered; at the scene of the first crime, "Ask Mother" has been written on the wall with the victim's lipstick. The New York Sentinel newspaper whips up a frenzy (and boosts circulation) by leading almost every edition with screaming headlines about the Lipstick Killer. [1]

The Sentinel whips up a frenzy.

At this moment of crisis Walter Kyne (Vincent Price), the idle and pleasure-loving son of the founder of the Sentinel, takes over the flagship paper his father built over decades and ran with an unerring news sense even as he laying dying in his sickbed. Kyne has no intention of being a hands-on owner; he just wants to enjoy the vast wealth his inherited media empire generates. But he has no idea which of several candidates to choose to run the place in his absence.

So Kyne creates a new position, Executive Director (or as he describes it, "someone to do the actual work"). To fill it he sets up a cutthroat competition to solve the Lipstick Killer case, which pits the smarmy head of the wire service Mark Loving (George Sanders), the hard-nosed managing editor of the newspaper Jon Griffith (Thomas Mitchell), and the playboy photo service chief Harry Kritzer (James Craig) against one another. The paper's star reporter and the anchor of its nightly television news show, Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews), tries to keep himself above the fray, but that proves to be impossible.

The newsroom is an incestuous stew. Mobley is dating Loving's virginal secretary Nancy Liggett (Sally Forrest), whom Loving also—Lovingly?—drapes his arm around when she's in his office.

Nancy attempts to peel Loving's hand off her shoulder while taking dictation.

Meanwhile, Loving has a dissatisfied mistress, columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino), whom he sends to seduce Mobley to get information. She doesn't seem too unhappy about the assignment.

Mildred gives Mobley the eye over a drink or four.

And Kritzer is sleeping with Kyne's brassy wife Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming), who tries to plant suggestions in her husband's ear that favor her lover. In a coincidence that will have importance in the plot, their love nest is directly across the hall from Nancy's apartment.

Incidentally, any resemblance between Ed Mobley and Edward Murrow is probably intentional. The film is adapted by veteran screenwriter Casey Robinson from Charles Einstein's 1953 novel The Bloody Spur (whose title is taken from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: "But hollow men, like horses hot at hand,/Make gallant show and promise of their mettle./But when they should endure the bloody spur,/They fall their crests and, like deceitful jades,/Sink in the trial"). At the time Einstein's novel was published, Murrow's television career was well underway; by the time the film was in production his two 1954 CBS See It Now programs on Senator Joseph McCarthy had made Murrow the image of the fearless, incorruptible journalist.

Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s. Image source: Golden Globes

In collusion with the police detective leading the case, Mobley's longtime friend Lt. Burt Kaufman (Howard Duff), Mobley hatches a plan. On his newscast, as the camera zooms in for a closeup, he taunts the watching killer (John Barrymore, Jr.) as a "momma's boy" who reads "the so-called comics" (a copy of The Strangler, a lurid comic book in the style of EC's Crime SuspenStories, is left at the scene of the second murder).

Mobley taunts the watching Lipstick Killer

The gay-baiting and comics condemnation are very much of their time; the dual moral panics of the Lavender Scare led by McCarthy and Senator Everett Dirksen, and the anti-comics crusade led by psychologist Frederic Wertham (author of Seduction of the Innocent (1954)), reached their peak around the time of Lang's film. [2]

Cover of Crime SuspenStories No. 23, July 1954, illustrating the story "Last Resort" by George Evans. Cover artist: George Evans. Image source: CGC Comics

Still on-air, Mobley then announces his engagement to Nancy, setting up his fiancée as bait for the killer. Nancy learns about the scheme only after Mobley's news show; it's confirmed when she sees the pairing of the engagement announcement with the latest Lipstick Killer story on the front page.

"Lipstick Killer as Mama's Boy/ Congratulations: Edward Mobley to wed Nancy Liggett"

With understandable reluctance, and after Mobley points out the plain-clothes detective who will be shadowing her, Nancy agrees to the fait accompli. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

The corruption and injustice of society and the darkness of the psyche were themes Lang had long explored, first in Weimar Germany (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, 1922), Metropolis (1927), Spione (Spies, 1928), and M (1931)) and later continued in his Hollywood films such as You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Window (1944), and his American masterpiece The Big Heat (1953). But the protagonist setting up his fiancée to be attacked by a serial killer is eyebrow-raising even among the grim scenarios of Lang's other films.

At the same time, Lang's direction of While The City Sleeps seemed to me often to lack the distinctiveness of much of his earlier work. The cinematography by Ernest Laszlo, who also shot Impact (1949), D.O.A. (1949), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), is sometimes flat—though it's hard to tell if it's primarily the fault of the grainy Warner Bros. Archive Collection DVD transfer I watched.

The scenes that bring out the best in Lang and Laszlo are late in the film, as Mobley chases the killer through the deep shadows of the subway tunnels, providing an opportunity for some taut suspense and striking images as trains bear down on the men in the darkness.

Mobley chases the Lipstick Killer through the subway tunnels.

While The City Sleeps is one of Jonathan Rosenbaum's alternative list of the 100 best American feature films that didn't make the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest American movies. I think there are some other films (and even some other Fritz Lang films) I'd probably put on my alternative 100 list before this one; The Big Heat is a glaring omission on both Rosenbaum's and AFI's lists. But While the City Sleeps is definitely worth watching, especially if you're an Ida Lupino fan—her character is deliciously duplicitous, while remaining fundamentally sympathetic as a woman using her considerable allure to maneuver for power in a man's world.

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1. There was a real "Lipstick Killer" on whom this character was based, who may have killed two adult women and a six-year-old girl in Chicago in late 1945 and early 1946. The murderer used the second victim's lipstick to scrawl a message on the wall of her apartment: "For heavens sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself." 17-year-old William Heirens confessed under duress to the killings and was sentenced to three life terms in prison. Characters in the film refer to this real-life case and even quote the "I cannot control myself" message.
2. Also very much of their time is a work culture where all the women in the newsroom are seen as fair game by the men; every character smokes at any opportunity, indoors or out; and they all pound down alcohol at an alarming rate—we see Mobley in particular get absolutely hammered more than once.

The end of summer: The Summer Book

Sophia (Emily Matthews) and her grandmother (Glenn Close) in The Summer Book (2024). Image source: ToveJansson.com

The Summer Book is a film adaptation of the elegiac 1972 novel of the same title by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson (pronounced something like TU-veh YAN-son); the novel's highly-praised English translation by Thomas Teal has been reprinted in the U.S. by New York Review Books.

Cover of the U.S. reprint of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Image source: New York Review Books

Jansson is perhaps best known for her Moominland books, which are considered children's classics. But like all the best children's literature, they can be read with pleasure by, and have some implicit messages for, adults as well.

Cover of A Treasury of Moomin Tales, "Adapted from three classic stories by Tove Jansson." Image source: Bookshop.org

The Summer Book is one of five novels and five collections of short stories that Jansson wrote for older readers. It's about Sophia, a six-year-old girl who spends the summer after the death of her mother in a cabin on a small island in the Gulf of Finland with her father and elderly grandmother. As the season blossoms and wanes, the grandmother guides Sophia to an appreciation of the natural world that surrounds them, and helps her come to terms with the inevitability of change and loss.

Jansson herself spent almost every summer in an island cabin, as a child with her family and as an adult joined by her life partner, the artist and teacher Tuulikki Pietilä, whom she met in 1955.

Tuulikki Pietilä with Tove Jansson and Tove's mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson on the island of Klovharun, circa 1960s. Image source: ToveJansson.com

Affectionately known as "Tooti," Pietilä was the model for the Moomin character Too-ticky, always pictured in a striped sweater and beret.

Cover of Moominland Midwinter (1957) by Tove Jansson. Image source: Eustea Reads: A Life in Books and Tea

In The Summer Book the character of Sophia was based on Jansson's niece Sophia, who was six during the summer of 1968, while the grandmother was based on Jansson's mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson (known as "Ham"), also an artist, who was 86 in 1968.

Sophia Jansson's grandmother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson in the 1960s. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The father is based on Sophia's father and Tove's brother Lars Jansson, who was also an artist and a writer. Sophia's mother Nita passed away when she was young, and, according to the webpage for Sophia's autobiography Three Islands: Father, Mother and Me, her father offered "security and care" but also "an unwavering silence." The actor portraying Lars in The Summer Book, Anders Danielsen Lie, bears a strong resemblance to the photograph of Sophia's father on the cover of Three Islands. That photograph may have been taken during the very summer fictionalized in The Summer Book.

Cover of Tre Öar (Three Islands) by Sophia Jansson, Förlaget, 2025. Image source: Rights & Brands

Screenwriter Robert Jones' adaptation of The Summer Book is a quiet film in which a series of small events and the rhythm of the tides and the weather accumulate emotional weight. The grandmother takes Sophia to her favorite place on the island, the moss-covered Magic Forest; they plant herbs and flowers and watch them grow; the ferryman, Eriksson, arrives with a box of fireworks for Midsommar which includes a surprise gift for Sophia; Sophia and her grandmother discover that a new, wealthier family has erected a prefabricated cottage on a nearby island, and in defiance of a "No Trespassing" sign make themselves at home on their deck.

The film was directed by Charlie MacDowell, and the starkly beautiful land- and water-scapes were shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen using natural light. Grøvlen's photography is striking; my partner compared the opening scenes of the island in winter to the work of the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

Some of the film's symbolism is perhaps a touch too apparent, and there are both small and significant differences between the film and the book. To take one example, in the book the rich neighbors, a businessman and his family, are unpleasant; in the film, when they discover the grandmother and Sophia on their property, they invite them into the house and offer them cake.

But the performances, particularly of Glenn Close as the grandmother and Finnish actress Emily Matthews as Sophia, are very honest and brave. Close fully inhabits her role as a weathered and wise elder who smokes, drinks, and wanders naked in the woods, while Matthews is all too convincing as a girl who is just another summer or two from young womanhood, but who remains a watchful (and sometimes annoying and willful) child. Anders Danielsen Lie is memorable in the scenes in which he's featured, but for long stretches of the film the father is absent, withdrawn into his own grief.

The Summer Book is meditative and melancholy, and the end of summer is the perfect time to watch. Check your local public library's streaming services. The website ToveJansson.com, the source of many of the images in this post, is a treasure-trove of information about Jansson's life and work. Particularly revelatory for me were the pages Work Fuelled by Desire, about Jansson's courageous determination to break her engagement to a man and live the truth of her love for women at a time when homosexuality was officially illegal, and Island for the Solitary and Free, about the importance of the Pellinge islands to Jansson and the origins of The Summer Book.

Signe Hammarsten Jansson with Sophia Jansson on Klovharun, circa 1960s. Image source: ToveJansson.com

Coda: There is a lovely short film on YouTube narrated by Sophia Jansson, Klovharun, Tove Jansson's summer paradise inspired the Moomin stories, which contains 8mm movie footage shot mainly by Pietilä on Klovharun between 1970 and 1991. There is also a 45-minute documentary, Haru, yksinäisten saari (Haru, Island of the Solitary, 1998), edited from Pietilä's footage by Kanerva Cederström and Riikka Tanner, who paired the images with texts written by Jansson and read by Brigitte Ulfson. The full documentary can be found on familiar video sites.

The Other Bennet Sister

The Other Bennet Sister (BBC, 2026). Left to right: Maddie Close (Jane Bennet Bingley), Poppy Gilbert (Elizabeth Bennet Darcy), Elizabeth Bruccoleri (Mary Bennet), Molly Wright (Kitty Bennet Buncock), and Grace Hogg-Robinson (Lydia Bennet Wickham). Photo credit: James Pardon. Image source: BritBox

I have ambivalent feelings about spoilers in commentary about novels, movies, and opera. I try to avoid them (not entirely successfully) in my writing for E&I, or where they are unavoidable given what I want to discuss, usually set them apart with "Spoiler alert!/End of spoiler" tags.

Of course, there are works of narrative art that are spoiler-proof. Would it ruin Joyce's Ulysses to know before undertaking to read it that Molly Bloom has the final word, and what that word is? Would it ruin an Astaire–Rogers musical to know whether, after their initial antagonism, Fred and Ginger wind up as a romantic couple? Would it ruin Tosca to know how many of the four main characters survive the opera? [1]

Perhaps this is why I've lost count of the number of times I've watched my favorite movies or experienced my favorite operas (although La Bohème would be my Puccini choice rather than Tosca). And it's perhaps why I read and reread the novels of Jane Austen: knowing the outcomes does not diminish the pleasures they offer.

But despite the numerous spoiler-proof examples among my own favorites, I try to avoid learning too much about a narrative work before I encounter it for the first time. Partly this is to preserve the enjoyment of the unfolding story without knowing what will happen. And partly it's to keep my thoughts about what I'm experiencing as free of preconceptions as possible. So when I heard that the BBC streaming service BritBox would be carrying a series based on Janice Hadlow's 2020 novel The Other Bennet Sister, which I hadn't read, I deliberately avoided reviews, promotional interviews, and trailers, and urged watching friends not to tell me about it.

Cover of the U.S. edition of The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow, Holt Paperbacks, 2021. Image source: Bookshop.org

As a result of avoiding others' thoughts on the series I independently came up with my own (mis)conceptions: I thought that the entire 5-hour, 10-episode series was a retelling of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of Mary Bennet. Mary, of course, is the middle Bennet daughter, and is plain, bookish, and moralizing where her older and younger sisters are beautiful and kind (Jane), lively and witty (Elizabeth), and gossipy and flirtatious (Kitty and Lydia). Also, while Jane and Elizabeth have a close bond, and Kitty "follow[s] wherever Lydia leads," Mary is something of the odd girl out among the sisters, and does not have a close companion among them.

Austen is unsparing in her description of Mary:

Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. [2]

Seeing the action of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the introverted, socially awkward and often-overlooked Mary would have been brilliant enough, and indeed this is how the series begins. We watch the arrival of the Bingley party at the Meryton assembly, Mr. Collins' inept courting of every Bennet sister but Mary, her humiliation at the Netherfield Ball, and, finally, the carriages rolling off with her sisters and their new husbands, leaving her behind.

Title page of Pride and Prejudice: A Novel in Three Volumes. By the author of "Sense and Sensibility." T. Edgerton, 1813. Image source: Internet Archive

We also see a few scenes outside the two inches of ivory of Pride and Prejudice: the growing friendship between Mary and her oculist, Mr. Sparrow (a character not in Austen's novel, played by Aaron Gill), quickly squashed by the overbearing Mrs. Bennet; and, of course, the news of Kitty's marriage to a Mr. Buncock (also Hadlow's invention). But by the end of the second 30-minute episode we have reached the end of the action of Austen's novel, which turns out to be the prelude to Mary's continuing story.

That story mixes elements from multiple Austen novels and their adaptations, primarily—spoiler alert!—Sense and Sensibility. Like Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters on the death of Mr. Dashwood, Mrs. Bennet (Ruth Jones) and Mary (Ella Bruccoleri) are forced to leave their home after the death of Mr. Bennet (an especially ascerbic Richard E. Grant) and the inheritance of the estate by a near relation, Mr. Collins (Ryan Sampson).

While staying in London with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner (Indira Varma and Richard Coyle), Mary is introduced to Tom Hayward (Dónal Finn). Like Sense and Sensibility's Edward Ferrars, he is shy and unassuming, but Hayward's love of Wordsworth's poetry suggests hidden depths of feeling. Unfortunately, he also resembles Edward Ferrars in turning out to have an existing understanding of mutual commitment with another young woman.

Mary then meets a more available man, William Ryder (Laurie Davidson). Like Sense and Sensibility's Willoughby, he is charming, handsome and impulsive. Also like Willoughby, his attachment is genuine but his intentions are dubious.

—End of spoilers.—

The 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice series seems to have been a particular touchstone for the principal screenwriter Sarah Quintrell and casting director Kathleen Crawford. The actress portraying Mary, Ella Bruccoleri, bears a certain resemblance to Lucy Briers, who played Mary in that series:

Left: Ella Bruccoleri as Mary in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Lucy Briers as Mary in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Bristol Live; Right: Jane Austen Literary Foundation

In a knowing wink to fans, Briers herself appears in another role in The Other Bennet Sister: she plays the kindhearted family maidservant Mrs. Hill, who becomes a sort of surrogate mother to the lonely Mary.

Lucy Briers as Mrs. Hill in The Other Bennet Sister. Image source: TV Guide

Tanya Reynolds as Caroline Bingley has a supercilious and disapproving look that is not dissimilar to that of the brilliantly awful Anna Chancellor in the same role in 1995:

Left: Tanya Roberts as Caroline Bingley in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Anna Chancellor as Caroline Bingley in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Bristol Post; Right: Frock Flicks

And Charlotte Lucas's calmly appraising gaze when she's in the company of Mr. Collins is a feature both of the performance of Anna Fenton-Garvey in The Other Bennet Sister and that of Lucy Scott, who played Charlotte in 1995:

Left: Anna Fenton-Garvey as Charlotte Lucas in the 2026 BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister.
Right: Lucy Scott as Charlotte Lucas in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
Image sources: Left: Oxford School of Drama; Right: TV Tropes

In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary gets to visit the Lake District with the Gardiners, the trip for which Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice must substitute "a more contracted tour" to Derbyshire. During the tour of the Lakes there are incidents that recall Catherine Morland's rain-drenched expedition to Blaize Castle in Northanger Abbey and Marianne Dashwood's accident in Sense and Sensibility. And Quintrell carefully weaves in throughout the series moments that echo Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion.

But The Other Bennet Sister is more than a pastiche of characters and scenes from Austen. In the series Mary is (largely) freed from the burdens of living with her belittling father and domineering, emotionally manipulative mother. While traveling and residing with her sympathetic aunt and uncle, and no longer subject to her parents' constant unfavorable comparisons of her to her prettier and more outgoing sisters, Mary slowly gains in self-confidence and self-knowledge. She grows beyond the character as imagined by Austen and as seen through the eyes of others in Pride and Prejudice. As Janice Hadlow writes in her novel, "There was no-one to judge her. Here, she thought, she might alter everything about herself if she wished to." [3]

The series is also unlike Austen and other Austen adaptations in the marked presence of people of South Asian heritage among the commercial and professional classes in London, among them Mr. Sparrow, Mrs. Gardiner, and the woman with whom Thomas Hayward has an understanding, Ann Baxter (a character not in Hadlow's novel, played by Varada Sethu). While such a prevalence would probably have been more characteristic of London at the end of the 19th century, decades after the Regency period in which The Other Bennet Sister takes place, it's a welcome reminder that Britain was then and remains now a multicultural society.

Richard Coyle (Mr. Gardiner) and Indira Varma (Mrs. Gardiner) in The Other Bennet Sister. Image source: Yours

Before seeing The Other Bennet Sister, I also thought that I knew how Mary's story would end. In A Memoir of Jane Austen, Jane's nephew James Austen-Leigh (her eldest brother James' son, who attended her funeral in Winchester as a 20-year-old) wrote of his aunt,

She certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter. . .She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we learned. . .that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher than one of her uncle Philip's clerks, and was content to be considered a star in the society of Meriton. . . [4]

Title page of A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh, Third Edition, 1872. Image source: Internet Archive

I hope it's not a spoiler to inform you that this is not Mary's fate in The Other Bennet Sister. As novelist Jo Baker writes in her review of the novel, living with the Gardiners allows Mary to "let down her defences. . .[and] become comfortably herself." And with that new comfort in her own skin comes the possibility of true happiness. [5]

Many thanks to the dear friends who enabled us to see the series (and no, BritBox, no passwords were shared). We found it delightful, and were happy to learn that we can expect a three-part (90-minute?) Christmas special in December.

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1. Spoiler alerts!
   
   • Ulysses: The famous final words of Molly Bloom's novel-ending monologue are ". . .yes I said yes I will Yes."
   • Fred and Ginger: Their producer Pandro S. Berman once said, "The minute the names of Astaire and Rogers go up on the marquee, the audience knows they belong together." In fact, in only two of their musicals do they not end the movie as a romantic couple, and in those two films their characters are husband and wife: The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) and The Barkleys of Broadway (1948). They don't end these two films together due to an untimely death in the former, and an amicable divorce in the latter.
   • Tosca: Of the four major characters—the artist Mario Cavaradossi; his lover, the opera diva Floria Tosca; Cavaradossi's friend, the escaped political prisoner Cesare Angelotti; and the head of the police, Baron Scarpia—none survive the end of the opera: two die by suicide, one by murder, and one by firing squad. SF Opera apparently does not think that widespread advance knowledge of the fates of the characters is any detriment to the box office: including 2026–27, Tosca has been scheduled in eight of the past 26 seasons, or about once every three years.
   —End of spoilers.
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Thomas Edgerton, 1813. Ch. VI, p. 52. https://archive.org/details/prideprejudiceno00aust_1/page/n61/mode/1up
3. Janice Hadlow, The Other Bennet Sister, Holt, 2020, Ch. 52.
4. J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, Third Edition, Richard Bentley and Son, 1872, pp. 148–149; https://archive.org/details/memoirofjaneaus00aust/page/148/mode/2up. Exactly how Mary and her husband wind up living in Meryton, rather than in London where he is employed, is not explained, but Austen may have imagined that Mr. Gardiner would set up his clerk as a shopkeeper in the village on his marriage to Mary.
5. Jo Baker, "The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow review – what happened to Mary after Pride and Prejudice." The Guardian, 11 January 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-other-bennet-sister-janice-hadlow-review

Behind the arras: Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

DVD cover (from Sweden) of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, Focus Features, 2022. Image source: Kvarnvideo

Business as usual

With the ever-growing attention paid to the Met Gala, and the Met's current "Costume Art" exhibit showcased in its prominent new Condé M. Nast Galleries, it seems that fashion is having (yet another) cultural moment.

In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, art critic Jed Perl seems disconcerted by the apparent corporate takeover of the first exhibition space encountered by visitors to the Met. He writes,

What’s troubling isn’t that there are fashion exhibitions at the Met. What’s troubling is that there is reason to believe that the fashion industry has bought what amounts to prime real estate at the Met—and bought it for the foreseeable future. . .Named galleries are nothing new in museums, but naming the galleries devoted to fashion for Condé M. Nast, a publisher instrumental in the development of the fashion industry, is anything but disinterested. . .The cost of the galleries, estimated at something like $50 million, was covered by companies and individuals, all or nearly all of whom have ties to fashion. [1]

Perl gives as an additional example of the influence of the fashion industry on curatorial decisions the designer Thom Browne, current chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Browne donated sufficient money to the building of the fashion galleries that one of them is named after him; he also has at least three pieces in the "Costume Art" show that is inaugurating the galleries. Perl asks, "But didn’t anybody worry about the impression of a quid pro quo? When it comes to fashion, does the Met regard this as business as usual?"

The short answer is yes. The Met has a long history of financial connections to the fashion industry, which has played a huge and determinative role in how fashion is collected and depicted at the Met.

In 1946 Dorothy Shaver, president of the department store Lord & Taylor, was instrumental in raising money from garment manufacturers and other fashion-associated businesses to establish the Costume Institute at the Met.

"What is the American Look? It is made of many things: Dorothy Shaver (standing) discusses with artist Dorothy Hood and Art Director Rodman virtues and flaws of girls applying as American Look models." Life, 21 May 1945, p. 88. Photo credit: Nina Leen. Image source: Internet Archive

Two years later, fashion industry publicist Eleanor Lambert organized the first Met Gala as a benefit for the Costume Institute. Lambert was already an influential tastemaker in art and fashion, and her sponsorship of the Gala ensured its continuing success.

Eleanor Lambert in a James Galanos floral evening gown, ca. 1952–53. Image source: The Bend Bulletin

Although the Costume Institute became a curatorial department of the Met in 1959, the powerful influence of the fashion industry continued. In 1972 Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Harper's Bazaar who had just been fired after a decade as editor-in-chief of Vogue, became a "special consultant" to the Costume Institute. She organized its annual exhibitions into the late 1980s. It was Vreeland who introduced the idea of annual themes for the Costume Institute exhibits and their associated Galas.

Diana Vreeland, ca. late 1970s. Image source: Mercht

In 1995, the then-current editor-in-chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour, became the chair of the Met Gala and organizer of the Costume Institute's annual exhibitions, positions she holds to this day. Vogue was and is the flagship publication of Condé Nast. In recognition of her fundraising for the Costume Institute, in 2014 the wing of the Met housing the Institute was renamed the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Wintour continued as editor-in-chief of Vogue until 2025, when she became Global Chief Content Officer and Artistic Director of Condé Nast. Now Condé Nast has funded the Met galleries in which the Anna Wintour Costume Center's collection will be exhibited. All very cosy and circular.

Clarissa Alcock, Anna Wintour, and Annette Reed at the 1995 Met Gala. Photo credit: Nick Haddow. Image source: Yahoo News UK

Fashion and sustainability

It's ironic that fashion is attaining unprecedented cultural influence at a moment when we are facing a global sustainability crisis. The core business model of the fashion industry is, of course, anti-sustainability: convincing us that the clothes we wore just last year are shamefully out of date and need to be replaced.

The fashion industry is not only predicated on planned obsolescence, but as designer Natsai Audrey Chieza has noted,

. . .the textile industry is one of the most polluting in the world [second only to the petroleum industry, according to some accounts]. Most of the ecological harm caused by textile processing occurs at the finishing and the dyeing stage. Processing textiles requires huge amounts of water. And since the oil age completely transformed the textile industry, many of the materials and the chemicals used to process them are petroleum based. And so coupled with our insatiable appetite for fast fashion, a huge amount of textile waste [in the US, roughly 85 percent] is ending up in landfill every year because it remains notoriously difficult to recycle.

The fashion industry has also outsourced the manufacture of its products to low-wage countries with few worker protections and lax environmental regulations. The finished clothes then are shipped around the world to the points of purchase, creating supply-chain emissions and waste.

The fashion industry's exploitative practices are not limited to the manufacture of its products, of course, but also feature explicitly in their promotion, in which profits are generated by portraying the bodies and fostering the insecurities of young women. In model Cameron Russell's widely viewed TED talk, she says that while half of 13-year-old girls in the United States express dissatisfaction with their bodies, by the time they are 17 that figure rises to nearly 80 percent. Her talk was given in 2012, just after the founding of Instagram, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, and four years before the appearance of TikTok. A recent study has stated that among young women, "intensity of social media use has been shown to be associated with poorer psychological well-being, including more negative body image" [2].

Haute couture portrays itself as standing outside of this system; its designs are often one-of-a-kind, custom-sewn and -fitted creations. However, high-end fashion houses and the conglomerates that own them generally also produce ready-to-wear clothing. The haute couture collections can be seen as reputation-building loss leaders that promote more profitable ready-to-wear lines. High fashion has gone mainstream.

Which brings us to the subject of today's post:

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) features E&I favorite Lesley Manville as Ada Harris, a charwoman in 1950s London. One day Mrs. Harris sees a Christian Dior gown in the closet of one of her employers, and is overwhelmed by the beauty of its design and the fineness of its materials and construction. It is unlike any dress that she has ever seen up close before, and she yearns to be able to wear one like it.

Lesley Manville as the title character in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Image source: Focus Features

With her war widow's pension and her life savings (multiplied by what turns out to be a fortunate bet), she travels to Paris to obtain an evening gown from the source: the Dior atelier.

She quickly learns from snooty atelier manager Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) that Dior serves an exclusive clientele that does not include charwomen. However, Mrs. Harris is rescued by one of those clients, the Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), who invites her to the presentation of the new collection as his guest. [3]

The Dior atelier is in some financial difficulties due to the habitually belated payments of their rich clientele, and Mrs. Harris's ready cash convinces Dior to accept her as a customer. Mrs. Harris desires a red dress called "Temptation," but it is claimed by a regular client, and so she selects an alternate dress in green—still very beautiful, but not the one she most wished for. Although at first she is treated with condescension and hostility by Madame Colbert, she ultimately wins over the staff, acts as matchmaker to a shy couple among them, and points the atelier to a way out of its financial bind by expanding its customer base. It is a lovely and sentimental story in which every catastrophe ultimately leads to a better outcome, and good will and solidarity win out over divisions of class and circumstance. Lesley Manville gives a delightful performance in the title role, and we enjoyed the movie very much.

Behind the arras

In reality, Christian Dior was bankrolled by one of the wealthiest textile manufacturers in France. The house, founded in late 1946, offered its "Corolla" collection just a few months later. The collection, which featured a tailored look on the upper body and narrow waists paired with full skirts, was referred by Harper's Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow as "The New Look." It was a decisive repudiation of wartime austerity, featuring luxurious fabrics and, for the skirts, shocking amounts of expensive yardage, and it made Dior instantly famous.

Dior's New Look, Spring-Summer 1947. Image source: Dior.com

The house quickly added added an accessories shop selling Dior-designed hats, scarves, handbags, jewellery and other accessories; later perfume and shoes were added. By 1949 Dior had opened a second store in Manhattan, and by 1950 according to one estimate accounted for 5% of France's entire export revenue. [4] So the house did not need Mrs. Harris's advice to improve its financial position; it was dominant almost from the first.

All this is not to say that everyone (and not just the wealthiest people in consumer economies) should not have beautiful, well-made, durable clothing. But in making fashion a mass-cultural obsession, the fashion industry—as so eloquently described by Cameron Russell in an interview with TED Radio Hour's Manoush Zomorodi—has instead developed a global system of gendered exploitation for its own profit.

It's a system that frequently has damaging consequences for those caught in it, as in the notorious sexual exploitation of young women in the modelling industry. The consequences can also be deadly: in 2013 a nine-story building near Dhaka, Bangladesh that contained five garment factories collapsed, killing over 1100 workers and injuring more than twice that number, mostly women. A report by Adiba Afros and Sifat E Nur Khanam published in The Daily Star (Dhaka) on 18 April 2026 and headlined "Rana Plaza, 13 years on: No justice, no memory," points out that "after 13 years, there has been little movement on accountability—not a single court has yet delivered a final judgment [against those responsible]. While humanitarian aid was provided, no compensation has been paid [to victims or their families] for the most devastating catastrophe in the history of the global fashion industry."

"Rescuers and volunteers navigate the catastrophic ruins of the Rana Plaza building in Savar following its collapse on April 24, 2013." Image source: The Daily Star (Dhaka, Bangladesh)

Among the brands for which the factories produced clothing were luxury retailer El Corte Inglés, Benetton, Mango, and The Children's Place.

But the fashion industry tries to mask the suffering involved in the manufacture and distribution of its products. And the presentation of its designs in the Met's Condé M. Nast Galleries, which (in Jed Perl's words) "have the pale gray walls and crisp architectural details of a Madison Avenue boutique," is a key element of this campaign. As Perl concludes, the Met has allowed itself to become "an infomercial for the fashion industry."

Update 2 September 2026: For the 2027 Met Gala and exhibition Anna Wintour had planned to honor the fashion designer John Galliano, who has won British Designer of the Year four times. Galliano has been Wintour's protégé throughout his career.

He was head designer at Christian Dior from 1996 until February 2011, when he was suspended and later fired when a video surfaced from the previous October of Galliano telling two women at the Paris café La Perle, "I love Hitler. People like you would be dead today—your mothers, your forefathers would be f***ing gassed and f***ing dead. . .You're ugly." The video is available on YouTube, should you be interested.

But it's not like his reign at Dior had been without controversy before he drunkenly spewed his hatred in public. His 2000 "clochard" (tramp) collection featured ripped and torn clothes that looked like they'd been assembled from old newspapers, accessorized with empty bottles of alcohol. The runway models were made up to look as though their faces were smeared with dirt, and their hair was tousled as though by exposure to the elements. He defended aestheticizing poverty, homelessness and addiction through luxury commodities by saying that he drew inspiration from the Parisian "Rag Balls," which were held during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and where the rich amused themselves by dressing as beggars.

A dress from John Galliano's "Clochard" Collection, 2000. Image source: Pinterest

When Galliano's horrifying comments and attitudes were surfaced once again this summer, on 31 August he withdrew from the planned exhibition and Gala (under, we might imagine, strong pressure). Whether there will be lasting damage to Wintour's reputation and influence is not yet known.

In this episode, the cronyism, corruption, and appalling politics of the fashion industry and its artwashing exponent, the Met's Costume Institute, could not have been made more blatantly evident.

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1. Jed Perl, "Fashion Forward: Why has the Metropolitan Museum of Art sold prime gallery space to the fashion industry?" New York Review of Books, 23 July 2026. [subscription required]
2. Jaehee Jung, David Barron, Young-A Lee, Viren Swami. 2022. "Social media usage and body image: Examining the mediating roles of internalization of appearance ideals and social comparisons in young women." Computers in Human Behavior 135: 107357. Figshare.com
3. The film is a remake of Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, a 1992 CBS-TV movie of Paul Gallico's 1958 novel of the same title. In the role of the charwoman Ada Harris, the 1992 version offered Angela Lansbury, with Diana Rigg as Madame Colbert and Omar Sharif as the Marquis.
4. Leah McGrath Goodman, "A Surprisingly Modern Take on America From a Long-Dead Frenchman," Newsweek, 21 January 2015.

In memoriam: Robert Cole

Robert Cole in Zellerbach Hall, with the set from Mark Morris's The Hard Nut onstage. Set designed by Adrianne Lobel after Charles Burns. Image source: Cal Performances

On 16 July I learned of the death of Robert Cole at age 95. As the director of Cal Performances from 1986 until 2009, and the founder of the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Exhibition in 1990, Cole had a huge role in shaping my tastes in opera, music and dance.

It was Cole who brought the White Oak Dance Project to Berkeley in 1991. It was only the second time I'd seen Mikhail Baryshnikov perform (the first for my partner), and it was our first encounter with choreographer and dancer Mark Morris. The following season Cole invited the Mark Morris Dance Group to give only their second Bay Area performances (the first had been a part of Cole's 1987 Cal Performances season).

Seeing Morris's company for the first time was, for us, a life-changing event. As I wrote in my appreciation of his biographer Joan Acocella, "We were astonished by the range of tone, movement, and music represented in his dances, from the urgent questioning of Gloria (set to Vivaldi) to the funny, lewd, and touching Going Away Party (set to the music of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys). Morris immediately became our favorite living choreographer."

Mark Morris Dance Group in Gloria. Photo credit: Stephanie Berger. Image source: MMDG.org

I wasn't aware that this was a moment of crisis for MMDG. Morris's three-year contract as the Director of Dance at Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels had not been renewed at the end of the 1990–91 season. At La Monnaie, Morris had expanded the scale of his works and the size of his company. Its ability to perform the works he had created in Belgium, and indeed its very survival in its present form, were at stake. Cole began making MMDG performances annual (and often biannual) features of the Cal Performances season, and commissioning new works. Those bookings must have been a lifeline for the troupe.

Beginning in 1994, in three successive seasons Cole brought to Berkeley each of the three evening-length masterworks that Morris had created during his time at La Monnaie: the joyful L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato (to Handel's oratorio); a danced version of Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, in which Morris played both the tragic Carthaginan Queen Dido and her evil nemesis the Sorceress; and The Hard Nut, "Morris's highly entertaining—and funny, lewd, and touching—version of The Nutcracker" (a quote from the Acocella post), for which Cole himself took the conductor's podium. We quickly realized that we needed to get tickets to two different performances for each MMDG program in order to fully grasp what we were seeing and hearing.

Guillermo Resto as Aeneas and Mark Morris as Dido in Dido and Aeneas. Image source: Stage and Cinema

Dido and Aeneas was our introduction to Baroque opera; the pit band was the period-instrument Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under its longtime conductor Nicholas McGegan. Afterwards we immediately sought out the PBO/McGegan recording of the opera, still my favorite of the work, which featured the matchless Lorraine Hunt as Dido. This led to our discovery of the series of Handel operas and oratorios recorded by PBO under McGegan with Hunt as soloist, and then to the music of other Baroque-era composers: Monteverdi (Lorraine Hunt appeared in SF Opera's 1998 production of L'Incoronazione di Poppea), Gluck (in 1996 Cole presented Morris's production of Orfeo ed Euridice), and Rameau (in 1998 he presented Morris's production of Platée). Cole and Morris opened up the whole world of opera to us, which we continue to explore and delight in.

Cole commissioned many world premières from the company, and sponsored many West Coast premières as well. Among the latter, Mozart Dances deserves a special mention, and for a fuller description you can read my post on the performance. For the former, I should mention in particular Falling Down Stairs, Morris' choreographic response to Bach's Third Suite for Solo Cello, with the cello accompaniment played live by none other than Yo-Yo Ma. Here is the Prelude from this work:

https://youtu.be/CUkLdATMx58?t=1944 [Prelude ends at 35:40]

Remarkably, in the second half of this program Yo-Yo Ma went into the pit as just another of the musicians accompanying The Office (set to Dvorák) and Rhymes with Silver (set to Lou Harrison, another world première).

Another choreographer with whom Cole formed a lasting association was Merce Cunningham, whose regular visits with his company (generally accompanied by his life- and creative partner John Cage) we looked forward to eagerly. Especially memorable were Ocean (presented in the round in the university basketball gymnasium, music by Cage) and the computer-enhanced BIPED (music by Gavin Bryars).

Lyon Opera Ballet in Merce Cunningham's BIPED. Photo credit: Agathe Poupeney. Image source: The Dance Enthusiast

Cole also gave us the electrifying experience of seeing mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli perform live; the punk-rock Italian Baroque ensemble Il Giardino Armonico (who accompanied Bartoli on one tour); stunning recitals by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Philippe Jaroussky; concerts by gambist Jordi Savall and his wife and musical partner, the plangent soprano Montserrat Figueras; and many, many other memorable live performances. As with Morris and Cunningham, once an artist appeared on the Cal Performances stage they often returned in later seasons. Clearly Cole inspired a strong sense of loyalty among many of the artists he sponsored.

Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras in concert. Image source: RadioFrance

I vividly remember the annual excitement surrounding the first day of Cal Performances season subscription sales: people used to line up hours in advance, because the time stamp on your order (along with the size of your donation) determined the priority with which it would be filled, and your chances of getting your preferred seats. We were made to feel as though it was Cole and Cal Performances who were doing us the favor by allowing us the privilege of purchasing tickets. Of course, it was true.

The performing arts climate has changed since Cole's heyday. For many organizations subscriptions are declining sharply, and the cost and difficulty of the logistics of sponsoring international artists have grown significantly. It's unlikely that we'll see another impresario in the Bay Area who combines Robert Cole's excellent taste, keen eye for emerging talent, and both the drive and the seemingly limitless resources to realize his ambitious vision. It's our great loss.