Fashion week is upon us again. A month of new collections, glamorous parties and flashing bulbs; a million images, a travelling circus. As London turns to Milan, then Paris, I’m thinking about the fashion world as seen on screen: real and fictional designers, models and the worlds they inhabit. Fashion is a fascinating subject for directors because it is already a kind of cinema, with its stars and costumes, its sets and lighting, its tableaux of carefully staged fantasies. Like cinema, it is all about looking and the construction of images.

The following films and documentaries take us from the catwalks and ateliers of the big cities to photoshoots where vanity, ambition and violence play out. Bitchy designers, grandiose editors, wide-eyed models, pretentious photographers – nobody is above satire. This selection of films set in and around the fashion world should satisfy your appetite for even more high-fashion drama.

EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978)

In Irvin Kershner’s 1978 classic, Faye Dunaway plays Laura Mars, a controversial fashion photographer who develops the ability to see murders from the killer’s point of view. The murders begin to resemble the images she makes, which depict sensationalised editorial violence. To make matters worse, the victims are all people she has worked with. Based on an original screenplay by John Carpenter, Eyes of Laura Mars is a stylish Hollywood take on giallo, capturing the iconic New York fashion scene of the late 70s.

The film features photographs by Helmut Newton, whose provocative fashion imagery served as a reference point for Laura’s work. A visceral air of glamour, eroticism and brutality runs through the film, most strikingly in the photoshoot scenes, where models in fur coats and lingerie wrestle against a backdrop of burning cars. Theoni V. Aldredge designed the costumes, and Faye Dunaway’s chic autumnal wardrobe is, pardon the pun, to die for.

WHO ARE YOU, POLLY MAGGOO? (1966)

Fashion photographer-turned-director William Klein’s Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is a French arthouse mockumentary satirising the excesses of the fashion world. Dorothy McGowan, a model whom Klein frequently worked with, plays Polly Maggoo, an American supermodel being followed by a French television crew. Polly is a kind of Alice in Wonderland-like figure who inhabits a world where her image is constantly manufactured by others. Philippe Noiret plays the reporter, and Grayson Hall is Miss Maxwell, a magazine editor modelled on Diana Vreeland.

Having worked as a photographer for Vogue in the 50s and 60s, Klein turns his camera on a familiar world, aiming for the increasingly entangled relationship between fashion, television and the media. The film has the quality of a strange fairy tale and opens on a fashion show where models, including Donyale Luna, parade in unwearable aluminium garments that resemble brutal artworks, sharp enough to draw blood. It is fashion as spectacle verging on violence, but for all its absurdity, Klein’s world is beautiful, just as fashion imagery can be.

PRÊT-À-PORTER (1994)

Robert Altman’s star-studded ensemble comedy Prêt-à-Porter is set during Paris Fashion Week, and brings together Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren, Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Richard E. Grant, Stephen Rea, Kim Basinger, Lauren Bacall, Rupert Everett and Anouk Aimée, among many others. Then there are the cameos: a seemingly endless parade of fashion royalty, from Jean-Paul Gaultier, Thierry Mugler, Issey Miyake and Sonia Rykiel to Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni and Cher. Should I go on?

Chaotic and full of iconic looks, Prêt-à-Porter follows a series of plotlines involving the death of the head of the Fashion Council, the sexual antics of three rival magazine editors and an American television reporter desperate for a scoop, all while some of the industry’s biggest names present their collections. Altman shot during Paris Fashion Week SS94, turning Prêt-à-Porter into both a fashion archive and a satire of the industry’s rituals and hierarchies. Few films cover quite so much ground in their portrait of fashion.

BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964)

Mario Bava’s 1964 giallo, Blood and Black Lace, is set in an Italian atelier. The film follows a masked, gloved killer stalking the models of a fashion house in Rome. It is a world of high glamour: mannequins, jewels, gowns and luxurious fabrics, but the beautiful women who are constantly looked at and manipulated by designers become victims of violence. The showroom becomes a place of horror.

With its luscious cinematography and outlandish colours, Blood and Black Lace is considered a foundational giallo, influential on the genre’s later visual and thematic conventions, and on the work of Dario Argento. Against the historical backdrop of post-war Italian fashion, the film feels almost handcrafted itself, an exquisite object, cut and polished like the artisan luxury it depicts.

HIGH & LOW – JOHN GALLIANO (2023)

Interested in the full story behind Galliano’s surprise Met exhibition withdrawal? Kevin Macdonald’s documentary High & Low – John Galliano tells the story of the designer’s rise through the ranks of fashion, from his own legendary label to his tenure as creative director at Dior, to his fall: the infamous racist and antisemitic abuse he directed at people in a Paris bar, for which he was criminally convicted and given a suspended fine in France in 2011.

Using clips from Abel Gance’s silent epic, Napoleon, a major visual reference throughout the film and an inspiration for Galliano, Macdonald weaves a riveting narrative about a complex character, one of the greatest yet most controversial British fashion designers. The documentary begins with the notorious footage of his tirade of abuse, then works backwards through his life and career. A scene where he conflates the vile rant with incidents from a later altercation is shocking. How do we reconcile artistic achievement with harmful behaviour, and where do responsibility and compassion sit within that?

EXPOSED (1983)

Exposed is a little-seen thriller about a fashion model who falls in with a dangerous crowd, written, produced and directed by James Toback. It stars Nastassja Kinski as Elizabeth, a young woman who leaves rural Wisconsin for New York City, where she is discovered while waitressing and becomes a supermodel. She falls for a violinist named Daniel, played by famous Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who, in one unforgettable scene, plays her body like a violin with his bow. When modelling takes Elizabeth to Paris, she becomes entangled in Daniel’s pursuit of Rivas, played by Harvey Keitel, a terrorist who killed Daniel’s mother in an attack. Her glamorous new life in fashion opens onto a world of political intrigue and violence. While more loosely set in the fashion world than some of the others on this list, Exposed depicts it as a gateway into a world of sex and danger. Often camp, certain to shock, Exposed is cool and weird: a singular viewing experience

BLOW-UP (1966)

Swinging London is the setting for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, the story of a fashion photographer who believes he may have captured a murder while examining a blow-up detail of one of his photographs. The thriller was hugely influential in glamourising the world of fashion photography in the 60s. David Hemmings, whom Antonioni discovered after seeing him in a stage production, plays a character inspired in part by legendary photographer David Bailey: young, sexually liberated, surrounded by glamour and treated like a rock star. Antonioni adapts a short story by Julio Cortázar for the cinema, using unorthodox editing to give the film the rhythm of a photoshoot. It is a film about the creation of images and the power they wield. Antonioni’s first English-language film won the Palme d’Or in 1967, becoming an enduring portrait of the glamour and unease of Swinging London.