The Devil's Thread: Part I
What Fashion Films Leave on the Cutting Room Floor
“I’m incurable.”
Reynolds Woodcock, Phantom Thread
(2017, Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
“I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.”
Emily Charlton, The Devil Wears Prada,
(2006, Dir. David Frankel)
The needle slips at 3 AM. A bead of blood blooms against ivory satin. In the movies, this is where the camera cuts away — a clean little mercy, a dissolve to morning, the wedding dress mysteriously complete, perfect, unstained. But there is no cutaway. There is only me, alone in my kitchen, surrounded by pins and seam rippers and pinking shears glinting like surgical instruments under a sixty-watt bulb with a dusty shade.
Because this is not a film.
“I’m a dressmaker,” I tell people, a benign declaration that conjures images of neat rows of scissors, colour-coded thread, and gentle afternoons spent in creative fulfilment. The reality is closer to Friday night in A&E: late-night panics about clicked fabric, blunt needles, rogue irons, and, yes, regular blood draws.
This was not the dream the movies sold me. No Miranda Priestly to impress, no Cruella de Vil moment where genius bursts forth in a perfectly choreographed fashion show, no Woodcock-style revelation where inspiration strikes like divine lightning. The films promised late nights ending in promotion and creative frenzies culminating in romance. They never showed the desperation of a zip break, or unpicking a seam for the third time, deadlines slipping through pricked hands like silk, or how your shoulders crack after twelve hours of hand-beading like a joint of meat on a spit.
I have sewn drunk, sewn through my fingernails, sewn with my right eye bandaged shut from a stye-removal operation, the left eye doing the work of both and developing, over the course of that week, a nervous independence it has never fully relinquished. I have sewn on kitchen tables, on dining-room floors, on my bed, in my bed, on ironing boards pressed into service as tables in flats where there were no tables, in the passenger seat of a car doing seventy on the A19 with the seatbelt cutting across the bodice like a sash at a hideous pageant. I have sewn behind a velvet rope in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, Middlesbrough, like an animal in a zoo — a rare and underfunded species, observable but not to be approached, performing the ancient and diminishing craft of its kind for an audience of zero. I have used spray paint to blacken a batch of black crepe that was a shade lighter than the fabric used for its sister dresses, airing it out behind the shed in my garden whilst the client was pulling up outside. I have used furniture fabric to accommodate the exact shade of silver a client wished to have.
I have conducted fittings in all manner of venues. In the single-use bathroom of the Swatters Car on Linthorpe Road where the hand-dryer set off at any slight movement; in the single-use bathroom of a Nando’s at Ashford International, whose lock didn’t quite catch. In the car park of a Premier Inn, where a bride stood on a bin bag in her stockinged feet while the hem lifted in the wind and, for a moment looked like something from a painting you’d see in a gallery and walk past without stopping, which is what beauty is, mostly, a thing almost nobody pauses for. I have travelled six hours and fifty minutes on a Megabus to London to alter a dress, the overhead light broken, sewing the final seam by the motorway’s sodium glow, and returned the same day, in the same seat. I have bought a flight to Ireland to let down the hem of a gown for a client in Galway who, two days before her wedding, changed her shoes — changed her shoes — and required the already shortened dress hem to be lengthened.
There are approximately three-quarters of an inch of difference between one fantasy and another. And crucially, there is no montage for this. Montages are merciful, they make labour look inevitable, even pleasurable. They give suffering a funky beat, a colour grade, an end point. Real work — the repetition, low-level dread and constant recalibration between what is possible and what has already been promised — has none of that generosity.
The blood is still there, beginning to feather into the weave. I reach for a scrap of white bread—an old couturier’s trick that no glamorous fashion film has ever thought to include. As dawn breaks and the deadline arrives, I begin again.
Life is but a movie. But if it really were, we would begin here:
I
When I first saw Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil in 1996, I was so seduced by her imperious grandiosity, I relinquished my lifelong ambition to be a Spice Girl and sold my soul to the devil herself. She was magnificent, sweeping through rooms in Anthony Powell’s vast, weaponised silhouettes, barking orders at trembling designers. I wanted to be Anita, sketching serenely at her desk. The sketch itself (an elongated pose with one hip pushed out, leaning slightly forward with a haughty tilt to the head), almost entirely monochromatic black and white, with that single accent of red at the mouth, was so gestural and alive. You could even see the rough underdrawing, the scribbles around the hips and legs — all that visible thinking — that gave it its restless, spontaneous energy.
So I learned to draw, watched The Devil Wears Prada on repeat, each viewing feeding the fantasy that this gruelling apprenticeship would resolve into something elegant — something that did not involve purple pinpricks in my fingertips or finding thread in my underwear.
I wanted to see my work on a catwalk, to stand just offstage and watch it move — to catch that brief, knowing glance as something that had only existed in my head stepped into the light.
I got a mannequin and a sewing machine for my thirteenth birthday and lost hours to draping fabric, testing shapes, pulling things apart and starting again. It came easily at first (a dangerous sort of encouragement). When you are average academically, shit at sports, and unmoved by everything else, to feel naturally capable at something this intricate, this exacting — you don’t question it. You follow it.
It was beginning to arrange itself like a film — the inciting incident, the chosen object, the sense of a path unfolding. That this is what I was for.
And every film needs a mentor. Mine, delightfully, wore paint on her sleeves: an art teacher who didn’t laugh when I said I wanted to work in fashion. That, in retrospect, was the most important thing she could have done. At college, on a fashion design course just down the road (close enough to pass for fate), there was another voice. A tutor told us that if we learned to pattern cut and sew properly, we would never be out of work. People will always need clothes, he said. A simple fact, like never cut velvet on the fold, or a half-centimetre can ruin a corset, and alongside it, a more Faustian creed: that fashion was not a job but a condition. You had to live and breathe it. To step away from it, even briefly, was to reveal yourself as unserious. To admit that you were merely someone who made things, rather than someone who was what they made.
University should have been the continuation of that narrative. I’m still not sure what I expected from a fashion degree, except a certain seriousness. A winnowing that would separate those who meant it from those who didn’t. What I found instead was an aesthetic I couldn’t inhabit: the intellectual restraint of Comme des Garçons, the clean futurism of Courrèges, and a lot of pinched expressions and offences against things like silk taffeta and the colour purple — transgressions that seemed to signal something about taste we were expected to absorb, presumably, through osmosis. I could understand these aesthetics in theory. I could write essays about them. But I could not make them mean anything to my hands.
I just wanted to make pretty dresses.
I possessed a naive faith that things will improve on their own — that the next stage will be better than the last, without any particular effort on my part. College would be better than school. University would be better than college. By my second year, I had already begun to suspect that fashion and I were not meant to be together. That I might, in fact, want to be a writer. This felt like a private failure — a tumour of the wrong ambition. Could I simply remove the thing I’d dreamed of, having spent every free moment of my life pursuing it? Cut it out cleanly, like a nefarious lump, and be rescued into a different future?
At the time, no. I could not. My family had supported this path without hesitation — and anyone who works in a creative field knows how precarious, unsustainable, and punishing it can be. To have been given that support, and then to walk away from it, was a debt I had no right to cancel. So I stayed. I made it work (or tried to). I told myself that was the same thing.
I would go into the fashion industry, learn the trade, make myself useful. Test my faith once again that this next phase would be better than the last.
II
I took an unpaid internship at a small couture house in Mortlake, Richmond. Two surnames on a door of a tiny split level atelier in a business centre that smelled of clean stones and cold water, and the faint, slightly fishy scent of silk. It was the first intoxicating feeling that proximity to beautiful things might eventually produce a beautiful life.
And it certainly yielded unexpected proximities: a salt-of-the-earth movie star in the midst of a major life transition, a fleeting audience with an embattled princess and a legendary singer whose body odour destroyed tulle.
(Whenever I am having a bad day, I think of them: the biggest entertainer on the planet, who smells like the inside of a school sports bag — which is to say, they are just like you and me.)
From there, everything changed.
I worked, as an intern does: like a man pulled from water who keeps breathing harder than he needs to, long after he’s safe, because his lungs haven’t yet received the message.
There was no glamour in the tasks themselves. They were almost all groundwork: errands, copied patterns, panel after panel of mull cloth mounted onto crepe, the slow interfacing of fabric on fabric before a stitch was ever placed. I spent hours covering hook-and-eyes in thread, one by one, my hands dusted in talcum powder so the oils of my skin wouldn’t mark the thread. Each hook took three minutes. There were dozens per garment. It was repetitive, exacting, and completely absorbing — the closest I had come to meditation. I had found something like purpose, even in the smallest task. Or, more accurately, I had found a system in which my willingness to endure translated directly into value.
If this were a film, this is where the montage would go — something like The Devil Wears Prada sequence, where the pace overtakes the person. Andy Sachs running, adjusting, anticipating. Tasks stack, hands speed up, you stop questioning each instruction and start moving with them, almost ahead of them. That was the stage I was in: not yet fluent but no longer resisting; keeping my eye fixed somewhere beyond the repetition and beginning, just barely, to belong to it.
What it would not show is how quickly usefulness becomes identity, and how difficult it is to separate the two once they’ve fused — how the pleasure of being needed replaces the pleasure of the work itself, until you can no longer tell which one you’re showing up for.
Something you need to know about me is that I am a people pleaser. In the early days, this was an advantage. I was the one who would stay late, say yes, give you everything. And in return I wanted to be the synapse firing somewhere in the back of your mind the next time something needs to be fixed.
In film, as in fashion, burn out seemed to suggest you were working hard, doing it for nothing meant you were committed and if you were stressed it was because you cared. Sometimes, this effort is rewarded. Often it is simply absorbed, the way fabric absorbs a stain: completely, without comment, and with no mechanism for giving it back. You, the worker, the doer, the sufferer, are expected to wring meaning from your own depletion. And you discover too late — always too late — that the industry depends on exactly this self-laceration. It is the model. In any other industry, HR would exist.
But for a while, it looked exactly like the movies said it would.
I was learning the trade properly — not theoretically or through essays or the chronic disappointment of my university tutors, but with my hands, in real time, under pressure. A senior pattern cutter took me under her wing and made me sew corset toiles all day long, and then the next day, and then the day after that, pushing and pushing until the task stopped being something I thought about and started being something I simply did. I was being given more responsibility. Garment linings to sew, beading to crack and reinforce. A Brazilian seamstress allowed me to cut and prepare the panels of her gowns and what was assigned to her started to feel like ours.
The house was growing and I was growing inside it, and before long we had moved — a new atelier, an entire floor on Sloane Street, above Armani, across from Chanel — and I was part of the team that moved it, organised it and finally, occupied it. I was being paid, too. By the day. A thousand a month, four hundred of which went straight to the train, the rest swallowed by rent and bills — but still. Paid. It counted for something.
One afternoon the hum of the atelier was broken by a loud cheer from the business end of the floor. The house had been accepted into the Chambre Syndicale — the first British couture house in a century to earn the distinction. We had made history, and I had been present for it, which is not the same thing as causing it but is still something. Still something.
This is the moment Andy Sachs’ life goes up in smoke — where the one who only wanted to write finds herself, suddenly and against all expectation, winning. Hollywood would have eaten this up. The lighting, the cheer, the boy across the cutting table who started wanting to make pretty dresses, standing above Armani on Sloane Street, being part of something that mattered.
I would defer a year from university, work as a dedicated assistant to the pattern cutter (and anything else they needed me to be). I would go to Paris. I would leave my first relationship, already coming apart as the job remade me. I would learn about endurance and teamwork and discipline in ways that were entirely unglamorous and brutal. My age would show. My self-control would thin. My drinking, a remnant of my student days, would begin to pour quietly, then less quietly, into my professional life. The smoke screen of my fashion ambitions would clear, and the world I had spent years trying to get into would become, suddenly and terrifyingly, real.
Hollywood would not have known what to do with the next part.
III
My career find as a couture dressmaker finds its cinematic apex in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017), where the House of Woodcock’s atelier bathes in perpetual morning light, seamstresses gliding silently between workstations in clinical white coats. Anderson’s meticulous attention to this visual world creates an intoxicating portrait of haute couture’s golden age. It’s a beautiful lie, but an intentional one. The camera follows Reynolds Woodcock up his ivory tower while the true architects of his genius remain in soft focus, their hands moving like spectres at the edges of the frame.
When a Duchess arrives to collect her gown, she breathes, “It’s beautiful Reynolds, worth everything we’ve been through.” The seamstresses hover in the background, witnessing a triumph they helped create but cannot claim. Even Woodcock’s rare acknowledgement of labour — “months and months hunched over, sewing and sweating and sewing” — centres his singular devotion, erasing the collective reality of atelier work. The shared experience she refers to (the fittings, the adjustments, the anxiety of creation) belongs to more hands than just Woodcock’s, yet the film, like so many before it, perpetuates the myth of the solitary genius.
I was already learning how useful that myth was to everyone except the people sewing.
For all its austerity, Phantom Thread offers the comfort of inevitability: genius recognised, authority secured, a world arranged around the central figure who deserves it. Woodcock’s breakfast is ruined by a woman buttering her toast too loudly, and the film treats this as artistic sensitivity rather than what it plainly is, which is a man being a prick about toast. But the beauty of the dresses — the real, physical, hand-stitched beauty of them — earns him the right to the narrative.
Yet, the film never shows the bobbin running out at crucial moments, or beaded panels taking three attempts to lie correctly. It doesn’t show the desperate calculations of time versus perfection, the physical toll of maintaining inhuman precision hour after hour. It misses the atelier’s true dynamics — the eye rolls over impossible deadlines, knowing looks over outrageous demands, expletive-laden debriefs during stolen breaks.
Sacred rules echo through the House of Woodcock. ‘Never cursed,’ he stitches into garment linings. But in real ateliers, curses flow freely. They’re our pressure valve against the crushing weight of that very care. Every dress is a high-wire act without a net. One slip, one moment’s inattention, and weeks of work are ruined. No film shows that stomach drop when scissors slide too far, or the devastation of finding a flaw in fabric after cutting. They don’t show how ‘carefully’ becomes both mantra and curse when racing against time, exhaustion, and the inevitability of human error.
The film’s title could reference Woodcock’s mother’s hair sewn into his jacket, but it might better describe the unseen labour holding his world together. Like Greenwood’s cyclical score, our work moves in endless patterns: the repetition of stitches, the circular nature of fashion seasons, our hands continuing their phantom movements long after we’ve left the workroom.
IV
About a week after Paris — a huge success by all measures — I was called into a meeting and let go. They did it in the client showroom. It was a beautiful room — tasteful, considered, the furniture rich and well-chosen, the air faintly perfumed with a sandalwood and oud scent chosen for their Emirati clients. Everything in it was chosen to make you feel comfortable and safe.
We do not need you anymore, they said.
I had always assumed I would be the one to leave fashion eventually, when I was done with it, knowing it would never be done with me. In the version I had privately screened for myself, I left beautifully. Tossing the ringing phone into the fountain, if you will. I did not get summoned into a room and made redundant like an expense.
I went home, bought two bottles of wine, and paced around my flat trying to convince myself it hadn’t mattered. I had not yet experienced real loss — I didn’t even know anyone who had died. I had no framework for what this was, no lesson that revealed itself in the aftermath that I could see (perhaps because I had, quite literally, blurred hangover vision). There was just an absence where something had been, and the faint, nagging suspicion that I should have seen it coming but hadn’t, because I had been too busy trusting copious calico corsets could earn you tenure, and thinking that the problem that was entirely mine would resolve itself.
I spent a lot of time afterwards hiding from the definition of a firing. Some days it felt like the end of the world; to everyone else, barely a ripple. My role was replaced — presumably by someone reliable, or consistent, or at the very least one of the many who would have killed for the opportunity and could handle their drink in moderation. The meaning of it all seemed to depend on who was looking at it, and I had the worst view in the room because the situation forced me to look at myself in way I was not prepared for. I drank more than I could afford to, worked less than I needed to, told myself these were temporary adjustments, because the alternative is to admit that the whole thing needs underpinning.
I tried, instead, to build something of my own.
Looking for work in Chatham while waiting to return to university showed me how little I had understood about deprivation. There was almost nothing there — not for someone with a half-finished degree and a specialism in eveningwear. I went back eventually, struggled through, and left shortly before the end.
It was no longer enough to learn — I had to prove, more than ever, that this degree would lead somewhere. That the final collection might be sold, or shown at Graduate Fashion Week, or open a door that didn’t end in a crate in a foisty attic.
Between what I wanted to make, what the course rewarded, and what the awarding body required had to justify itself in ways that had little to do with why I had started.
In the end, that dissonance undid me.
I missed the dresses I’d seen at work — the clarity of them. The beaded 3D flowers laid over impossibly small French seams. The hand-rolled hems on sunray pleats. The soft tailoring of encrusted jackets and pencil skirts. Clothes that didn’t need to justify themselves. They were just beautiful and that was enough.
I headed north again, uncertain and underqualified, except in making really good corsets, which I had a feeling no one in the north-east particularly needed.
This is the part of the film where adversity produces independence. Where the absence of security is reframed as freedom.
In practice, it meant becoming a one-man factory.
V
In cinema, problems escalate until they reach a point of crisis, then reorganise into meaning. Phantom Thread does capture this almost accidentally: the film’s most telling moment comes when Woodcock, dazed and confused, examines a royal wedding dress. The seamstresses gather like supplicants at an altar, awaiting their high priest’s verdict. ‘Excellent work, Ladies,’ he pronounces, then: ‘It’s just not very good, is it?’ before collapsing onto the precious garment like a fallen idol.
What follows should be raw reality. Woodcock’s sister, Cyril oversees as seamstresses work through the night to salvage their creation. When Nana, one of the few seamstresses granted dialogue, says, ‘We’re going to have to do a lot of work to get this dress ready for tomorrow,’ it’s our closest glimpse of true deadline pressure. Yet even here, the film softens. Nana lists the extensive damage like mundane recipe ingredients, not the impossible physics of reconstructing a royal wedding dress overnight. The camera fixates on Woodcock’s artistic crisis rather than the real one unfolding under the seamstresses’ hands — their desperate calculations, their race against time. Like all fashion films, the dress must appear perfect by morning, and the seamstresses’ pragmatic heroics are apparently less compelling than the designer’s poetic suffering.
As someone who both designs and makes, I rarely have an artistic crisis. There simply isn’t time. I relate to the seamstresses who work and say nothing rather than to Reynolds who saunters off, lamenting about the ugliness of his own work and the disruption of his rituals. In reality, chaos tends to remain chaos. It becomes background noise. There is no angelic lighting or reverent silence — just me in my underwear (I need to be comfortable), swearing at broken needles, singing to stay awake, having my thrice-daily existential crisis.
Up north, I clawed for commissions, accepting whatever came my way and pricing it in a manner that suggested I did not believe it had value. As if I were trying to dissolve the need to be good at this by making it cost nothing.
I took on work I should have refused. I accepted deadlines that made no practical sense. I was paid £297.68 — down to the penny, precise as a medical bill — for an entire collection. The specificity of the number seemed to imply fairness, like a receipt implies a fair exchange. There were smaller failures too, the mother-of-the-bride outfit that never resolved into something wearable, despite repeated attempts. A jacket marked irreparably by an iron in the final hours before delivery — the scorch appearing on the satin like a bruise surfacing hours after the blow, too late to do anything but stare at the evidence of your own carelessness.
A suit, weaved entirely of grosgrain ribbons, made especially for the comeback of a beloved musician. It was never worn, now hanging in closet somewhere, immaculate and purposeless, made for a body and a stage and a moment and had missed all three.
It’s one of the best things I’ve ever received, she said.
Each commission brought about an irresistible longing for renewed success, a chance to prove this career was meant to be. I was hired on freelance as the designer for a boutique and tasked with making their debut collection. I would experience for the first time the task of working with people who talked about fashion and sold fashion but had no clue about making it. I embraced the challenge as I did everything in life so far, with an intensity that simply wanting it to work would lead to a successful outcome. I could not see the logistical issues — a thirty piece collection, plus stock, plus bespoke clients, all made by one man in the attic of his friend’s house on a rusty Singer Class 66 in the Lotus pattern, beautiful and entirely inadequate, purchased for £40 from a local charity shop.
And then there was the show.
At the end, I took a bow. The child in me was supposed to stir. Some small, sequinned ghost was meant to rise up and say: there, see, it was worth it.
The collection was not finished (and not in some purist, couture sense). Hems were uneven, tacked up with needle and single thread. Seams were raw inside. Some of the models were pinned into the clothes as they skulked down the catwalk.
This detail seemed, at the time, incidental. The show itself proceeded as though it were complete. The audience applauded. Photographs were taken. From the outside, it resembled success, like a shopfront resembling a shop, even when the shelves behind it are empty. Inside, I felt only a kind of dull, ringing exhaustion.
This is where the score music should swell, where morning comes and the garments are mysteriously complete.
There was no relief or pride, just the knowledge that I would have to continue working after this moment had passed, and that the moment itself — the one I had been walking towards — had turned out to be a doorway into more of the same.
A year back north, even with a handful of successful prom dresses and a reliable alterations gig that paid cash in hand, it was not sustainable. The work was there in spirit but not in volume. Normal jobs (ones that pay consistently and don’t ask you to justify why you own twelve types of interfacing) were scarce, and my CV consisted entirely of fashion, which had once been the intent and now felt like a trap. I was twenty-three and needed to pay rent, and I found myself longing, for the first time, for a more ordinary, useful work history. Something with a pension and a lanyard.
I went for interviews. I came close, sometimes. But nothing materialises as quickly as you need the money, which is, I suspect, how crime happens.
It crossed my mind.
Instead, I wrote an email. Then another. Then approximately a hundred more, to fashion houses in London.
On the same weekend I found myself in Hammersmith delivering the grosgrain suit to the musician that would never wear it, and one of them wrote back. A well-respected couture house in Hoxton. I had been invited for a trial.
I was due on the Megabus home later that day.
I went anyway. A woman appeared in the doorway of the studio and said my name. I recognised her immediately — the Brazilian seamstresses from my very first fashion job. She greeted me warmly, as though I were not a reckless alcoholic, and guided me through the trial: 3mm French seams and 2mm pin hems, over and over, until they were right. I stayed until they were right. I stayed so long that I missed the bus back to Middlesbrough entirely. My phone was ringing continuously — my cousin in Croydon, where I’d been staying, growing increasingly alarmed as my departure time came and went.
When I finally arrived back, they opened the door and said: The prodigal cousin returns!
The employed prodigal cousin, I said.
There are several moments in this story where a film would end. This is not one of them. It is, at best, the midpoint — what screenwriters call the false victory. The protagonist gets what he wanted and the audience exhales.
Within a week, I was moving back to London. Not as an intern this time, fetching coffees and covering hook-and-eyes with talcum powder on my fingers, but as a junior couturier — paid hourly, at the correct rate. I would be returning to the same world that had discarded me, and I would be walking back in through the front door.
For a moment, an ending presented itself: progress, recognition, a reversal of sorts. This is why films are dangerous. They understand longing so well. They give you the shape of a life — to be chosen, to be useful, to have the labour finally point somewhere — before you have the judgement to ask who benefits from that shape.
What I did not yet know was who — or what — would be waiting on the other side of it. How the work would harden, the ground would shift, plans would begin to fracture.
There would be legal action. Ruinous wagers on opportunities that gleamed just long enough to look like salvation. An escape plan, slowly constructed, then abruptly undone by a global crisis.
And — as in all the best films, and the worst years — someone would die.
Thank you for reading.
This concludes The Devil’s Thread: Part I.
The second and final instalment, The Devil’s Thread: Part II, will be released on 06.05.26.
I hope to see you there.
G x
Amazing stories. You are an artist!!!
I can't see the clothes you've made, but you are a magnificent writer! This is so beautiful, and I relate as a magazine writer-turned-author to the ways you have sacrificed yourself for a job you loved (and the people pleasing ... alas, it is often rewarded!).