In a year where fashion’s collapse and reinvention are unfolding in real time, Alice Wincour’s Couture premiered at TIFF this past week like an unpinned hem: loose, fraying, yet undeniably alive. Starring Angelina Jolie, Anyier Anei, and Ella Rompf, this women-led film brings its audience on a behind-the-curtain peak at the often-overlooked and painstakingly underpaid workers who keep the luxury fashion industry afloat. Titled Coutures in its French release, meaning seams or stitches, Wincour’s film is a raw and voyeuristic examination of the seams which hold the luxury fashion industry together.
Couture follows three women as they prepare for a Paris Fashion Week runway show with an unnamed French fashion house. Maxine (Jolie), a newly divorced mom and indie-horror film director, presenting her work as the featured media for the show, eighteen-year old Ada (Anei), the south-Sudanese debut model cast as the “new face,” and Angèle (Rompf), an underpaid makeup artist and aspiring writer, struggling to acquire publishing for her book about the many people and stories she’s collected in the industry.
The film approaches its theme with an incredibly hands-off approach. Though we follow the protagonists during the days leading up to this fashion show, the plot itself doesn’t drive toward a definitive climax. Conflict arises, our protagonists are faced with choices, but we, as the audience, are never guided to make the choice alongside them—there is a resistance of resolution. We are not asked to judge or decide, only to observe, to sit with the uncertainty, and to experience it as the characters do. “The film is very thoughtful,” Jolie shares during the post-screening Q&A. “You just sit through something, and you get to spend time with it and think about life and it’s as simple as that.”
Though surrounded by people, the film renders the women’s isolation unmistakable. Ada embodies it most clearly: freshly arrived in Paris, she carries the weight of leaving pharmacy school in Nairobi for a career defined by uncertainty. In a model house packed with girls shouldering the same burdens of family, migration, and youth spent too fast, her isolation persists. What we witness is the quiet, fragile courage of someone learning to risk everything for a dream.
“I know so many African girls who would love to chase their dreams,” Anei shares, “but it’s because of cultural differences or familial ties, or, you know, so many things that were touched on in the movie. They can’t really go out of their way to do it. So, I hope that whoever watches this movie and relates to others in any way can learn how to take risks.”
It’s not a story unheard of, but Wincour’s artful decision to source real models, integrating their real stories, does convey an almost documentary-esque quality to Ada’s story. Anei originally met Wincour at a fashion show. “I bumped into [Alice] backstage at Chanel when she was doing research for this movie,” Anei shares. “She was asking so many questions about South Sudanese and just doing her research, and I wasn’t interested at all. Then a few months later, my agent reaches out to me and asks me to do fittings for Chanel because a VIP client needed a model to do a fitting. So, I show up, and I end up doing the fittings for the clothes that Ada wears in the movie, even before I knew that I was part of the movie.”
Maxine’s story blurs almost seamlessly with Jolie’s own. Both are directors, both straddle American and French worlds, both are mothers. And both live under the shadow of breast cancer — Maxine newly diagnosed, Jolie having already chosen survival through a double mastectomy after learning she carried the BRCA1 gene. The character’s realism lies not in imitation but in the uncanny overlap of fiction and biography.
Maxine’s confrontation with death at the height of her greatest professional achievement feels both authentic and inevitable. Wincour creates a character who is “confronted to her own mortality in this world of appearances and this excitement of shows; torn between two worlds.” This emotional divide—bleeding for the world of glamour whilst being tethered to a real life that refuses to pause—mirrors the slow unraveling we’re witnessing in the fashion industry today. As economic instability fractures the fantasy of an industry largely built on illusions, the harsh weight of reality begins to peak through, reminding us of the personal burdens we carry behind the sheen of our professional lives.
At times the writing felt diluted, leaving both secondary and lead characters underdeveloped. Angèle’s arc, for instance, leans on shorthand and predictability: the overworked creative retreating to an empty studio apartment and a waiting cat. Arguably, reducing Angèle to type rather than complicating her role in the film’s ecosystem.
Angèle, played by Rompf, is an interesting ensemble-lead who does not get as much introspection as her counterparts. In small ways, the limited expansion of her character makes sense—her bond with the other two protagonists, Ada and Maxine, is formed almost instantaneously, which alludes to the “therapist” role that Angèle suggests is often placed upon makeup artists. Still, for the ethos of the film, this character is lacking. We know next to nothing about her beyond her exhaustion and her unfulfilled ambition to publish, and that absence feels symptomatic of a broader pattern: the film introduces characters with striking texture, only to let them dissolve. Christine, the seamstress who spends days hand-beading and resizing a gown, is never given a moment beyond her labor; the Ukrainian fit model connects with Ada through shared memories of war, then immediately catches a flight out. Whether intentional or not, this resistance to deepening the supporting cast leaves the audience suspended between the authenticity of transience and the disappointment of unrealized lives.
Considering the limited character-scopes might be a stylistic choice, one cannot fully hold the film at fault for its hands-off script and restrained approach. While fashion film often leans into escapism and spectacle, Couture exercises a commitment to showing rather than declaring. That’s not necessarily a flaw. Fashion itself, at its core, is often just that: a series of moments and movements, a lot of happening. “Some films have this complete center and this answer,” Jolie suggests, “and some more, just sit with you and say, ‘This is how we’re all trying to be and live together and understand things and connect.’” Couture is an examination of the splintering beams that uphold the luxury fashion industry. It introduces us to the women and their masterful creativity and the irrevocably human pain and constant choice of sacrifice that pushes it all forward and leaves us with the haunting remembrance that behind every inanimate garment and runway, are people.
Hannah Verina White is a Montreal and Toronto-based writer. She has a deep love for the melodramatic and nostalgic, both of which influence the way she writes and the subjects she chooses to write about.