23/09/2025 - Alice Winocour finds the humanity in haute couture in her newest feature, starring Angelina Jolie as a director plunged into a patchwork of personal and professional trials

Paris Fashion Week: it’s what dreams are made of, where spirits are crushed and where careers are made – or at least that’s what the world of high fashion tells us. But with her newest film, the aptly named Couture, writer-director Alice Winocour reaches literally and metaphorically behind the curtain to explore the aspirations of three women caught together in this place and time, and it’s much more relatable than one might expect. The film enjoyed its world premiere in Toronto’s Special Presentations section and has now surfed its way into San Sebastián’s main competition, vying for the Golden Shell. Winocour once again makes the French capital her secondary subject after Paris Memories [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alice Winocour
film profile] (2022), now as seen through the lives and gazes of these women, completely different in their walks of life, but aligned in their passion and desire to do good for those around them.

With its French title (Coutures with an “s”, meaning “stitches”), the French director pushes the sewing metaphor to its limit, but to good effect – weaving together a touching quilt within the frenzied, manic environment of Paris Fashion Week. Nonetheless, the industry event serves merely as a stage to discover her transnational set of characters. US film director Maxine Walker (Jolie, in a partly French-speaking role) is creating a short film for fashion week starring 18-year-old South Sudanese pharmacy-student-turned-model Ada (Anyier Anei), who is, in turn, cared for by the overworked but kindly make-up artist Angèle (Ella Rumpf). Angèle, who covers up cuts and bruises on models worn down by the catwalk, wants to share the countless personal stories from her make-up chair in a book. The film, by nature, decentres men, save for Anton (Louis Garrel), Walker’s cinematographer and trusted creative collaborator in whom she finds something more during this trying time.

Playing on elements of reality, Anei is herself a South Sudanese pharmacy student living in Nairobi, plunged into a new world after being scouted by Winocour. Ada refreshingly discovers that while the industry is naturally competitive, it’s actually also immensely supportive, and she finds an unlikely friend in a Ukrainian model who can understand her experience of fleeing conflict. Amidst the chaos of professional life and an ongoing divorce, Walker’s doctor informs her that she has breast cancer (echoing resonantly with Jolie’s family history of the same and her preventative double mastectomy), the treatment for which would pry her away from her precious creative work.

While some of the film’s everyday conversations feel dry at times, Couture flies high in its most poetic moments, in which it acts as a conduit to the personal and the oneiric. Walker’s reaction to her diagnosis brings out how we valorise productivity over the so-called expendables of family, friends and even one’s own health. Although Winocour never hammers home a particular biopolitical message, she works tirelessly to show how women's bodies are worn down or manipulated in different ways – and on the flip side, how other women serve as a conduit for repair or self-repair.

Contrary to what one might expect, the director never intends to capture the sheer brutality of Paris Fashion Week. Rather, Couture transforms into an exploration of connection at its most human, in moments of emotional and physical vulnerability. Granted, this thematic throughline could be explored more thoroughly through its visuals, but Winocour otherwise allows her characters to float as we navigate to the film’s near-fantastical close.

Couture is a French-US production staged by CG Cinema, Closer Media and France 3 Cinéma. Hanway Films holds the rights to its world sales.