Garmento

Fashion is a glamorous industry of beautiful people, right? Garmento tells the other side of the story, through a dark and comical look beneath the seams of New York City's rag business. Industry insider Michele Maher reveals an absurd world where shady dealings and ruthlessness are fashionable — setting the trend for corporate America.

Garmento is the fashion movie made from inside the industry it satirises, and it has long been the favourite film of this collection for exactly that reason. Its world is not the runway or the magazine office but Seventh Avenue: design houses, jeans companies, quarterly numbers and the schemes that protect them.

The Story

Poncho Ramirez is considered one of the greatest American designers of the twentieth century. But in 1993 his fashion house, Poncho Ramirez Inc., is near bankruptcy because of a failed product line. Rival company Romeo Jeans — a has-been brand desperate to revive its reputation — seizes the opportunity to rescue Poncho's company from financial doom and proposes an offer that cannot be refused. Although the rivals beg to differ in style and taste, everybody shares one thing in common: making money. The result of the joint venture is a clash of characters and a new jeans line. PR Jeans is introduced to the public with an obscene advertising campaign, stimulating controversy in the media and a buying frenzy among America's teenagers.

Sales skyrocket, launching the company into overnight financial success and its executives on a mission to take the company public. In their desperate reach for crucial quarterly numbers, company insiders scheme to protect the millions of dollars at stake. Backstabbing and foul play reveal a world of greed and power, where some people get what is coming to them — and others do not.

Satire From Inside the Rag Business

Garmento is a wickedly amusing satire of everything from the infamous designer jeans craze of the 1970s to the real-life tales of corruption inside the world of fashion taken from today's headlines. Its targets are the industry's own: the rescue merger that nobody believes in, the relaunch campaign built on manufactured outrage, the initial public offering that turns a clothing company into a numbers machine. Because Maher wrote from inside the business, the jokes carry documentation — the film's absurdities are the trade's everyday practices with the lighting turned up. The word itself is the industry's own slang: the garmento definition in the fashion terms section records the term the title comes from.

Production and Credits

Shot on New York City's Seventh Avenue — the garment district itself — Garmento was an official selection for the SXSW Film Festival 2002 and the Hollywood Film Festival 2002. It was written and directed by Michele Maher and stars David Thornton, Katie MacNichol, Jerry Grayson and Saundra Santiago. The film is rated R and runs 87 minutes: a compact running time for a story that moves at the speed of a selling season, from a rescue meeting to a launch party to a boardroom reckoning.

The Jeans Line at the Centre

It is fitting that the product at the centre of the plot is a jeans line. Designer denim was the garment business's great late-twentieth-century money story — a workwear staple reborn as a luxury logo — and PR Jeans compresses that whole history into one launch: a borrowed famous name, a desperate heritage brand, a campaign engineered to offend, and teenagers doing the rest. Maher sets the scam inside the trade's real machinery of seasons, sales conferences and quarterly results, so the satire never has to leave the office to find its material.

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