Academy Award-winning director Spike Jonze and actor Jonah Hill teamed up with their friends at downtown label Opening Ceremony for a hilarious take on the madness of New York Fashion Week. Staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in September of 2014, the star-studded fashion show presented as one-act play turned the tables on fashion’s glitterati, peeling back the proverbial (and literal) curtain to reveal the inner workings of a high-strung industry dominated by big outfits and even bigger egos.
And because the creative process is always in fashion, today The Creators Project debuts and exclusive look behind-the-scenes short film on the making of the aptly titled 100% Lost Cotton, starring Elle Fanning and Dree Hemingway as models alongside Catherine Keener and John Cameron Mitchell as Opening Ceremony co-founders Carol Lim and Humberto Leon.
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The production of 100% Lost Cotton came about through the co-mingling of real-life models and actors playing fashion world personas. For opening night, fashion world elites were invited to an unknown location and seated in bleachers, which turned out to be on stage at the Met. Looking into the four-story opera house, audience members were treated to a reinvented runway show of Opening Ceremony’s Spring/Summer 2015 collection—one where they were actually part of the fashion show.
Photos by Julieta Cervantes, courtesy of Opening Ceremony
“As we started to write it, the thing I thought was interesting was to have in the middle of Fashion Week this thing that is about fashion,” says Spike Jonze “but also has moments that are very human where the models are vulnerable…”
Co-authored with Hill over a couple of days, the script brings to life little fashion dramas that Jonze picked up from showroom visits with Leon and Lim.
The fashion performance is a complimentary ode to the struggles of launching a clothing collection during the infamous Fashion Week, fraught with social pressures. Hemingway’s character, “Bella,” says, “Do you want to know what modeling is? …You go to a fitting, or a casting, or a meeting, and have people look you up and down for 30 seconds without looking you in the eye.” In 100% Lost Cotton, art imitates life on a whole new stage.
Special Thanks to the 100% Lost Cotton Creative Team and Crew.
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