The cinematically intractable heroes and heroines of design

I've written before on the mysterious scarcity of designers in cinematic fiction. Notwithstanding this underpopulation, I received notice the other day of the forthcoming British Film Institute/RIBA season of architects and architecture on film. It's an impressively full and enticing list but it's certainly not long on personalities. The blurb betrays this rather disembodied character: "a varied programme of documentaries, features, silent classics and European cinema gems that demonstrate how the cinema uses architects and the built environment to influence our emotional responses". This suggests a rather indirect connection between the architect and the emotions.

I've written before on the mysterious scarcity of designers in cinematic fiction. Notwithstanding this underpopulation, I received notice the other day of the forthcoming British Film Institute/RIBA season of architects and architecture on film. It's an impressively full and enticing list but it's certainly not long on personalities. The blurb betrays this rather disembodied character: "a varied programme of documentaries, features, silent classics and European cinema gems that demonstrate how the cinema uses architects and the built environment to influence our emotional responses". This suggests a rather indirect connection between the architect and the emotions.

Alice Rawsthorn's been whiling away the August doldrums turning up the 20th century's design heroes on YouTube  - real gems here, and heroic, for sure; but it's not the stuff of fiction and fantasy. It's archivally thrilling if you're a design afficionado to witness Paul Rand describe his imperious handing over of the IBM logo to the importunate client (an unequivocal, single proposition), but I think not universally moving.

So what of Coco Before Chanel? Well, there's a wonderful scene in which she stands on a beach in Normandy watching fishermen haul in their nets, and the designers in the audience know she's studying their unique elegance. Sure enough, Coco shows up in the next scene in a fishing smock, and in the following ones looking utterly chic in a stripey matelot. Quite soon after this, her boyfriend Arthur "Boy" Capel rumbles her trying to filch his polo shirt and as she hands it back she asks what it's made of. "Jersey" he replies, and a century of Lacoste and Fruit Of The Loom and Uniqlo flashes through our minds. But generally I felt a want of design in this movie.

We examine her progress from orphanage to indifferent singing double-act in a bar with her sister to the inglorious concubinage from which Capel's capital rescues her. Through all this Gabrielle-Coco remains enigmatic - of course she does, her armour-plated persona concealing the indignities of youth and provenance. This makes her infatuation with Capel less than convincing (if Alessandro Nivola's rabitty teeth and nasty period moustache hadn't already). Although she cries at the news that he's been killed in a car crash, she's already admitted she's not the marrying type.

Naturally I yearn for the more full and convincing a story that could have been made of her evolution as a designer. Yes, there's the fishermen and the polo jersey, and a couple of other scenes in which she insists on sartorial sobriety against the taste of the times. But I wanted more clues to the trajectory from the full-length, meringue-hatted Edwardian style, at once blousy and corsetted, which she resolutely rejected, to the neat, knee-length, narrow shouldered, high-armholed, three-quarter-sleeved bouclé suit we know and love. Didn't Chanel also invent denim as a fashion fabric after admiring the indigo-overalled workers of Nîmes (de Nîmes)? I suppose that was Coco After Chanel, but cinema has license doesn't it?

The film ends rather abruptly. One minute Coco is presiding over her celebrity hat-trimming atelier; the next she's sitting on the now famous staircase of the Rue Cambon watching the descent of a sublime first collection. I suppose how she got from one to the other just doesn't make good fiction. Sigh.