The Devil's Thread: Part II

What Fashion Films Leave on the Cutting Room Floor

“May the bridges I burn light my way”

- Emily Charlton, The Devil Wears Prada 2

(2026, Dir. David Frankel)

VI

Few passengers on the 7:15 to York know I haven’t eaten or slept in almost 36 hours, or that this bridal gown is my side hustle — too sporadic to sustain me but too essential to abandon. Through the garment bag’s opening, I’m performing keyhole surgery — threading buttons through a three-inch gap, working blind, my fingers reading the fabric like a safecracker reads tumblers. I bargain with whatever deity might be listening: let the blood stain lift, let the beading hold, let me finish these last buttons before my stop.

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Every film needs a villain, and we are at the point in the story where the bad guys close in.

I returned to London and moved into the house that had once belonged to my Nan, sold decades ago to her sister, whose husband, Grandad Jon, still lived there sixty years on. My father was born in that house. He had slept, as a baby, in the very room I was now bunking in. Once again, my family had pulled together to make it possible, to make this possible. The two years since my firing were being reframed in my head as a minor road bump. A lesson learned. I was doing what people do in films when they narrate their own disasters: romanticising furiously, moving fast, hoping the story catches up.

The house had its eccentricities. Wallpaper peeled off, taking the photo frames down with it. The old sink leaked. The 1980s electric heaters had a loose relationship with electricity. I showered on a bath lift and learned to sleep through the sound of the stair lift as Jon came and went in the night.

Mostly, though, I wasn’t there. I left at six in the morning and rarely returned before six at night. I had a great deal to prove and, fortunately, this was the thing I was actually good at: absorbing myself in work so completely that everything else, including the burnout accumulating in the background, simply failed to register.

The designer was staging a comeback collection after a long sabbatical. It was a significant deal, and as I found my footing in my first serious adult role in fashion, something shifted. I made mistakes, but less often than before. I formed working relationships with people who seemed, to my considerable surprise, to actually respect me. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I was bluffing. The thing I’d been chasing wasn’t shrinking away anymore. It felt real, close, like something I’d almost dropped and caught.

I was still drinking, though the interpretation of that depended entirely on context. I was not a despondent, unemployed wreck drinking at noon in a dressing gown. I was an employed professional with serious responsibilities, making enormous tulle underskirts and stiffened corsets and a wedding dress for the daughter of a highly regarded, if notably difficult, British actress. I was not an alcoholic. I was a craftsperson who enjoyed a chilled bottle of Sauvignon Blanc after a long day in the atelier. There’s a distinction there. I needed there to be a distinction there.

After my first week, having racked up over five hundred pounds in billable hours, I lay in my childhood-adjacent bedroom and did the maths. My first proper payday. More money than I’d made in a week in years. And if the hours stayed like this, I could be a person with a functional bank account and a secure future.

Payday came. I opened my banking app in the early morning. The number was there. I stared at it for longer than was strictly necessary.

The following week, I was called into the back room. The designer had spread the collection’s sketches across the table, and he asked me, with the offhand confidence of someone accustomed to bestowing gifts, which piece I wanted. I looked through the sketches, chose what appeared to be a tea dress. Circle skirt, fitted sheer top, a clean corset beneath. Gentle. Achievable. I could see it coming together.

I was wrong.

It was the second-to-last piece in the collection. Twelve panels of crinoline, crosshatched with matchstick embroidery, French seamed together on organza.

And enormous.

There was a ripple of dismay through the more senior seamstresses when they heard. But the designer didn’t waver, and I didn’t ask him to. The dress was mine.

I started on it slowly, mounting the heavy beaded organza panels to the crinoline and binding each section with a care I hadn’t previously known I possessed. I checked in with the designer regularly, showing him my progress, openly inviting his assessment. This was not my natural mode. My natural mode was to struggle silently until either the problem resolved itself or I had a breakdown. But something about the dress, about the sheer scale of it, made that approach feel untenable. When it was far enough along, the designer came to inspect it. He looked at it for a moment, then at me.

“George,” he said, with a short nod. “Good work.”

I thanked him and went back to my machine, head down, warm with something I can only describe as earned pride.

Then payday arrived and nothing came through.

The studio manager — a bilingual maths lecturer — explained that the accountant was slow. Very slow, apparently. The following week: the same. The week after. The one after that. Each time, a mild apology, a vague assurance, and no money.

I started taking freelance commissions on the side to cover what the wage wasn’t covering, but I kept turning up to finish my dress. It felt, in the way these things do when you are operating partly on delusion, like the key to everything. If I completed it, if I was indispensable, if I was the one who stayed loyal while everyone else panicked, something good would happen. I liked the environment. I liked my colleagues. I’d even developed an easy rapport with the designer himself.

But the signs were there, quietly accumulating. A tension beneath the surface of the workroom that had no particular source but radiated from everywhere. Months later, it was confirmed in the press: fraud, unpaid wages, the company folding. He owed significant sums to creditors, to staff, to the craftsmen and interns who had believed, as I had, that the collection would right the ship.

This is not unusual. The fashion industry runs on a kind of structural precariousness, like the stiff fingers of a dressmaker who has sewn through too many winters. You accommodate it, and then you forget you’re accommodating it, and then one day you try to close your fist properly and find that you can’t, and you can’t remember when that started.

Drink helps you forget, too. And for a functioning alcoholic in a stressful industry, there’s a sustained effort required to maintain the fiction that the gin and tonic after work is a reasonable adult habit rather than a compulsion.

A check on Companies House would have shown a pattern — businesses opened, then closed, stock shuffled between entities, ownership transferred on paper to obscure what was actually happening. He wasn’t, I think, a crook by nature so much as a person running out of runway who kept convincing himself the next landing would work. The collection would rescue the business. The princess who had ordered a million pounds’ worth of couture would cover the debts. If he could just hold on a little longer, swim a little further out before turning back, he’d make it.

I understood this logic more than I should have.

The show appeared to go well. The coverage was positive. There was a narrative of comeback, of resilience, which I found personally resonant in a way I kept mostly to myself.

Afterwards, I was given the job of making a pair of silver zibeline trousers for the princess — a mark of trust from the designer, or so it felt. I made them alongside the senior couturier, a shy Polish woman in her forties who was extraordinarily good at her job. The trousers were nearly finished when an inspection revealed a click on the fly. The entire leg would have to come apart and be remade from scratch.

The designer, who had been absent from the studio for some weeks on a “business trip” to Puerto Rico (based on his Instagram: speedos, pool, cocktails, beautiful young men, not a spreadsheet in sight), was blessedly unavailable for this particular conversation.

Instead, the studio manager took me to one side, down several floors to the car park, and told me in his insufferably sardonic French accent that I would be “taking a long holiday,” and that once payroll had been sorted — a phrase that had lost all meaning by this point — I could return to work under the mentorship of the senior seamstress. “We see that you want to learn,” he said, which was generous and also clearly rehearsed.

I knew, standing in that car park, that there would be no return. I asked to leave immediately. They obliged.

Encouraged by a client with legal connections, I pursued the months of owed wages. A simple solicitor’s letter has a remarkable clarifying effect on people who owe you money, and in this case it worked. I received a settlement — my owed wages, minus the cost of the trouser fabric and the hours charged to the senior couturier who had to remake them.

Which is to say, I received virtually nothing. This was still more than my colleagues ever got.

The rest I heard through friends who stayed on. The collection had not rescued anything. The princess cancelled her orders. At the insolvency consultation, staff were informed that the designer had elected to pay no one. The couture division was shut down.

He blamed Brexit.

His final statement, as reported back to me: “I just wanted to make pretty dresses.”

VII

In an attempt to stay in London, I went freelance. I took on a client whose wealth had significantly outpaced her judgment. She presented me with crayon sketches of garments she wished to own — literal drawings, in the medium of a five-year-old. I agreed to realise them without upfront payment — a trial, framed as opportunity. The logic felt sound at the time, but it always does when you’re trying to stay in the room, when the only alternative to yes is the sound of a door closing on your way out.

The sketches were, in her mind, the foundation of a fashion label. She had everything the fantasy requires: a wealthy circle, an international lifestyle, lofty connections in the industry, and a husband who stood to inherit one hundred and eighty million pounds. On paper, this should have been viable. In practice, it collapsed against her complete absence of knowledge, talent, or what she called — without apparent irony — a “very specific budget.”

I worked for fifty pounds apiece. She bought a fashion phrasebook.

I could feel it happening again, that familiar sinking, the inexperienced drunk rising up through the floor to meet me. I had to make it work. She’d spoken of investing in a studio, of having me run it, of being a team. Her inexperience made her dependent on my knowledge in a way I found, if I’m honest, flattering. But flattery always arrives when your judgement is at its most porous. She would test my problem-solving, my initiative, my ability to manage time and materials without a proper infrastructure.

I told myself this was good for me. People tell themselves all kinds of things.

In the absence of a proper atelier, we made do. There was one occasion when a power cut in my own place had me rushing across London to finish a pencil skirt in the basement bedroom of her Paddington townhouse in the hours before she boarded a flight to San Francisco. A low point until several worse ones later arrived. Eventually we agreed on a compromise: I would make the collection from the north and travel to London once a fortnight to deliver the pieces and collect payment.

This led to semi-moving out of Grandad Jon’s, transporting a full-sized mannequin, sewing machine and luggage across London to her residence to collect another suitcase of fabrics, to King’s Cross, then onto a train. The mannequin rode beside me in the quiet carriage, its cloth body angled between the seats. At Darlington, as I attempted to disembark, it tipped forward, struck the curb, and fell triangle-tits-first into a puddle. A man with a suitcase stepped around us. The mannequin lay in the water, armless and legless, like a shitty snow angel.

A sign? In hindsight, yes.

I turned my parents’ kitchen into a production space. This was not a metaphor. Fabric was stacked where food should have been. Machines occupied surfaces designed for kettles and toast. The kitchen table — site of years of family meals, passed dishes, and Christmas dinners — became a cutting table, its surface scarred with blade marks.

In film, this is where resourcefulness gets framed as triumph. Andy Sachs is handed an impossible task — produce an unpublished Harry Potter manuscript by end of day — and she does it, through sheer nerve and the right phone call, and the scene lands as proof of her potential rather than evidence of an unreasonable system. Reynolds, meanwhile, is poisoned, bedridden, hallucinating his dead mother, and still the House of Woodcock functions. The dresses go out. The clients are satisfied. The work absorbs everything thrown at it and continues. A testament to his genius rather than a warning about what happens when a person mistakes their compulsion for a calling.

In reality, the work was simply expanding to fill whatever space it was given, the way gas fills a room — invisibly, completely, until you notice you can’t breathe.

At the same time, a client — a D-List television personality — threatened to ruin me publicly over an £80 skirt. Eighty pounds, all fabric cost, no making charge. The beading required to complete it had been discontinued while I was on a six-hour bus journey delivering seven bridesmaid dresses to a venue in butt-fuck-nowhere. The discontinuation was not, as far as I could tell, my fault, unless I was also responsible for the supply chains of the global textile industry, which, at that point in my career, I would not have been surprised to learn that I was.

I scraped together what money I had — borrowed twenty quid here, forty quid there — and refunded her. She later wore one of my designs to the National Television Awards without crediting me. The only clear shot of her was from the paparazzi who snapped her sauntering in the smoking area of the back of the venue. Classic tabloid journalism – so reliably awful at capturing people that, in her case, they got it exactly right.

This is what The Devil Wears Prada understands best, and most thoroughly exploits: the complete erasure of garment creation in favour of curation. In Runway’s sleek offices, clothes exist as if conjured from thin air. Fashion editors slide hangers across racks with casual indifference, dismissing countless hours of unseen labour with a brief ‘hmm’ and a ‘no’ before sending the garments away, deemed unworthy of a magazine page. The film understands power. It locates it entirely at the surface, the way a painting locates meaning on its face. If you’ve never seen the back of a canvas — the stretcher bars, the staples, the handwriting in pencil that says this side up — you might believe that’s where meaning lives.

Andy’s evolution, in its own way, exemplifies this. We marvel at the magic of access, the sudden ability to borrow any designer piece she wants. Her journey from dismissing fashion as shallow to understanding its artistry mirrors many viewers’ own dawning appreciation. But the real magic happens off-screen, where unnamed alterations specialists work overtime to make sample sizes fit her ‘non-model’ body. The camera glides past these imperceptible adjustments — the letting out of seams, the careful redistributions of fabric — cutting to Anne Hathaway’s strut down Manhattan streets.

In Phantom Thread, by contrast, the labour is visible, but reframed. The seamstresses exist, their hands moving constantly at the edges of the frame, but the narrative remains centred on the figure of the designer — his vision, his rituals, his breakfast, his crisis. The hands that do the work are permitted to be seen. They are not permitted to have names.

The collaboration with the wealthy wannabe-designer ended, mercifully, over a phone call. I was, by this point, up North full time and working across several prom dress and pageant orders. This side of things was going well enough. Her garments were costing more to produce than I could accept for what she budgeted. She insisted I take on my own interns and another seamstress to help.

“Make sure she knows she is working for us for free,” she said. “This is a trial job.”

I would not do it. I took on the help and tried to pay her myself. We completed her orders, sent them off in a box back to Paddington and I never heard from her again. As far as I know, she did not pursue fashion after the fact.

The external villains have had their impact on me, the protagonist, but the internal ones still had their day to rue — and they’re going to take us all the way up to the moment all is lost.

My alcoholism by this point was nearing the earning of its title. I pushed on through client orders and alterations. I took on two new clients: a bridal designer in Yorkshire, and a local designer I knew through the very small world that is the North Yorkshire boutique business. Alongside her, I was to create a collection and stock for the reopening of her shop.

Nothing dramatic happened here, except for the pouring of alcoholism into everything I did. My flaws circled like buzzards. I showed up, worked hard, tried my best to skirt over the inexperience that ticked like a second heartbeat. Sometimes I pulled through and the dresses were fine. Other times they were not. I stitched myself into messes and out of them. I developed good working relationships, earned the respect and reliance I’d always sought, and for a time this seemed to be going well. Until orders got out of control and I couldn’t keep up, until I was forgoing quality control just to tick off another job. Sewing began to feel like a chore — something to get through, to get to the end of, to get to the relief of not doing anymore. I wanted to get to that end-of-day glass of wine I’d nurse at the bar opposite the studio in the village where we worked.

The collection was completed and was, by all accounts, one of the proudest moments of my career. It tested everything I had in the design and construction of ready-to-wear. But the collection ended and the orders didn’t, and I couldn’t keep up — quality slipping, reliability slipping, the gap between what I was capable of on a good day and what I was consistently delivering widening in ways I couldn’t paper over. I was let go, and it was the right call.

The designer moved the business back to her home. The shop was never finished.

Somewhere between the woman in London who wanted to be a designer and this one, who actually was, I had become a recurring feature in stories that didn’t end well. I started to wonder how many times I’d been a nail in the coffin of someone else’s dream. The answer, I suspected, was more than once and fewer than I feared, but the not knowing sat with me for a long time.

This period closed out with a rather bizarre culmination of what I had achieved so far in my career: a local charity fashion show. A range of garments I’d made that year were showcased alongside a short biography that described me as a London-based designer trained in haute couture, which was either a genuine achievement or an elaborate fiction. Possibly both. In fashion, the two are rarely mutually exclusive.

A group of clients came back to model their own dresses. Mostly prom girls, tottering down a makeshift runway in gowns I’d sewn in my bedroom, or on a kitchen table, or through the night with a few vodkas to steady my shaky hands.

They changed in locker rooms next to a boxing ring that smelled of disinfectant and sweat and something older. Something that had been absorbed into the tiles over decades of bodies passing through. The red carpet was rolled out across a floor that had been cleaned as best as it could. Trays of pastries attracted flies that outnumbered the audience.

Desperately decorated, mildly celebratory, deeply flawed. For a good cause. Everyone behaving as though this were normal.

And they were right, it was.

VIII

There is usually a moment in a film where the narrative clarifies itself. A decision is made. A line is crossed. The protagonist understands, in retrospect, how they arrived there. In film this moment is commonly known as “all is lost”. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy is in Paris, finally succeeding, finally becoming the person Miranda wanted — and that’s precisely when it falls apart. She realises she has hollowed herself out to get there.

In Phantom Thread, Alma poisons Reynolds a second time and he knows, watches her do it, and eats the omelette anyway. He has been so thoroughly outwilled by someone he underestimated that his only move is surrender. The man who controlled everything — his house, his women, his work, his routine — consciously chooses helplessness.

In life, it is rarely visible while it is happening. It looks, from the inside, like any other Tuesday.

The bridal commission that ended it did not begin as exceptional. There was nothing, at the outset, to distinguish it from dozens of others — the same text messages, same measurements, same optimistic conversation in which a woman describes the dress she has seen in her head and I nod and make notes and begin the private, silent work of translating what she means from what she says.

What followed was not a single failure but a sequence of small, avoidable ones, falling like dominoes in a line I had set up myself. I delayed. I underestimated. I told myself I had time when I didn’t. And, more than anything, I drank.

There is a version of this story in which the problem is framed as pressure — too much work, too many demands, the cumulative strain of a career that had already begun to fray. That version is not entirely untrue. It is also not the point. The point is that I had a bottle of wine where a coping mechanism should have been, and that the bottle was more reliable than the mechanism, and that I chose it, repeatedly, with the full knowledge that it was making everything worse, because making everything worse was at least a direction, and direction, even downward, was preferable to the paralysis of not knowing what to do.

By the time I understood that the commission had slipped beyond recovery, it had already done so quietly — the way a seam gives, not with a tear but with a slow, silent parting of threads you don’t notice until the whole panel shifts. The standard I had built my identity around was no longer being met, and I did not have a way, in that moment, to correct it.

I finished the garments. They were not good enough. I delivered them anyway.

I had never seen a bride so undone.

I was on my way to dinner with my family when the message arrived. The starter had just been placed in front of me — bruschetta, ordered without much thought. I wasn’t really hungry but I needed to participate in the ritual of sitting at a table with people who love you and pretend that the table is the whole world. I took out my phone and opened the message.

They were planning to sue.

Composure that emerges under pressure resembles calm but is closer to the moment after a car crash, before the pain arrives — the strange, suspended seconds in which the body has registered the impact but the brain has not yet authorised the scream. I did not — could not — react immediately. I did not excuse myself from the table. I read the message, placed the phone face-down on the tablecloth, and continued as though nothing had happened.

I smiled when required. Contributed, where possible. I finished the meal.

This is the part that feels the most unreal. Not the threat itself, or even the consequences that followed, but the continuation. The ability to sit in a chair and eat food and form sentences while the floor beneath you has quietly been removed. As though the version of me at that table had already begun to separate from the one who would deal with what came next. Two people occupying the same seat, one of them eating soup, the other falling.

I paid the client back in instalments to avoid legal action. Two hundred pounds a week, drawn from wages I was earning as an admin clerk — a job that existed, in part, to stabilise the one that no longer could. The payments were regular, almost reassuring — a debt that could be measured, reduced, eventually resolved. It was the only part of my professional life that still made mathematical sense.

It took time. I did not tell anyone.

Shame, when it settles, does not behave the way films suggest. It does not produce visible collapse or public reckoning. It does not demand to be witnessed. It moves into the walls of you, the way damp moves into the walls of a house. It is slow, inexorable. The plaster begins to blister and someone asks why the room smells different, and you say you hadn’t noticed, and you’re lying, and they know you’re lying, and the conversation moves on.

Five years later, I think of that bride every day.

IX

This is where the protagonist would recognise what they had become. There would be a confrontation, or a confession, or some form of visible reckoning that allowed the story to turn.

I accepted a job teaching English in Zhengzhou, China. Some might call it running, but it felt like stepping outside the system I had been moving within for years without having to explain, or justify, or repair what had happened inside it. I could be someone who taught English. I could be someone who had never ruined a wedding dress. These were not incompatible identities. They simply required a sufficient quantity of distance between them, and Zhengzhou — five thousand miles, seven time zones, a language I did not speak — seemed like enough.

The flight was booked for February 2020.

The narrative I had attempted to construct — leave, reset, begin again elsewhere — dissolved before it had the chance to take shape, and I was left standing in the room I had been trying to leave, holding a passport and a TEFL certificate and nothing else.

So I stayed.

I moved, gradually, into education, taking a job as a vocational coach at a college on a zero-hour contract and enrolling on a psychology degree. It felt, at first, provisional. Something to occupy the space left by what had ended. A slow lateral stitch. A lining, not a garment. Skills transferred: attention to detail, patience, the ability to read a person’s body before they’ve finished reading their own mind. The instinct, maybe, is the same one — the one that makes you drop everything and run when you see a child heading for traffic.

X

The Dressmaker (2015) comes closest to showing us as a protagonist. Tilly Dunnage and her Singer sewing machine arrive like Excalibur returning to its rightful owner. Weapon and wand. One scene rings true: unsettled by her personal history, Tilly rushes through pinning a beaded bodice when her mother Molly interrupts:

“Your centre line is off.”

In this simple correction, we see years of history — the revelation that Molly, dismissed by the town as mad, was Tilly’s first teacher. ‘Centre-line’ becomes both instruction and metaphor — about finding your own centre when everything feels unstable.

In 2021, the art teacher — now a firm family friend — offered me a place to live. There is a temptation, in retrospect, to frame this as a circle completing — the mentor returns, the origin reasserts itself, the narrative tidies its own loose threads. At the time, it was simpler and less poetic than that. I needed somewhere to be. She had space. But there was always something steadying about her — the way a hand on a bolt of fabric stops it unrolling further. The person who had first treated my ambitions as viable was now, without comment, providing the conditions in which I could continue to exist while I worked out what those ambitions had become.

Grief finally introduced itself during a colourful wedding dress commission.

Our family dog, sixteen and nearing the end of her life, was to be taken to the vet to be put to rest. I was working through the night to finish the gown, made and remade numerous times to sit the sheet of floral embroidery perfectly on a curvaceous but unstructured bodice. I was to be on a train to deliver it in Yorkshire the following morning.

My mum called to say my dad would be taking her that afternoon. She’d had a big breakfast — salmon, bacon, sausages, all the things she used to paw at under the table. “Do you want to go with him?” my mum asked.

Yes. “I can’t,” I said. We both knew I could. We both knew what I meant.

I began to pack away my things and get ready to leave when my body did something it hadn’t done before: it simply refused. A physical certainty, like a door that wouldn’t open no matter how hard you pushed. I sat back down. I picked up the dress.

When my mum called later to say she had gone peacefully, in my dad’s arms, I put down the phone, walked to the shop, bought a bottle of wine, and paced the kitchen with music in my ears until it was empty. Then I went back to the dress and worked through the night.

In the morning I boarded the train to Knaresborough and delivered it on time.

Later that year, death made an appearance once again.

I was contacted by a couple who wanted a dress made for their daughter. A gown, definitely pink, with some bling and possibly some leopard print — she adored leopard print. They were very specific about this. The aesthetics mattered.

She had died at the age of seven.

Cystic fibrosis. They wanted her buried in something that resembled a princess gown — those were the words they used, princess gown, and the words carried with them a childhood spent watching films in which girls in dresses are rescued, transformed, granted futures that extend beyond the credits.

There was no ambiguity in the request, no discussion of alternatives, no negotiation over price or timing. Just a description of what they had in mind: pastel pink, full skirt, something that would feel appropriate for a child who had been, in their words, a princess all on her own.

I had contracted coronavirus and made the dress from the confines of my attic bedroom. It was, technically, straightforward: a lightly structured bodice, a layered skirt of organza and tulle adorned with pearls. A silk satin lining. An organza shawl with small, three-dimensional butterflies across the surface. They hadn’t asked for them specifically, but it felt consistent with what they were trying to create.

Something soft. Something that could ascend. When butterflies appear, as the saying goes, angels are near.

This is the only piece of work in my career that was entirely free of the usual conditions. There were no fittings, adjustments, or revisions. It simply needed to exist. I had the dress delivered to the funeral home, to the professionals who would dress her, and notified the family that the order was complete.

Her family did not see it until the day she was laid to rest.

The only evidence of this dress is a sketch I created and placed inside a memory box with a letter to the family who had hired me.

I tried to explain how I felt I was born to do something in fashion – a primitive need to want people to feel beautiful and special, to feel all the things we want to feel, but are often too afraid to ask for. How, with any passion we wholeheartedly pursue, the journey is full of successes and failures, peaks and troughs. How I have been the “Best-Dressmaker-Ever” and the absolute Worst. How, two years ago, after the commission that went horribly wrong, I chose to retire from bespoke dressmaking and retrain as a counsellor.

How working in a demanding, materialistic and often toxic industry, it’s easy to lose sight of why we do what we do. It’s not often I have an order that reminds me of why I chose this crazy career path in the first place, and why – for the love of God – I keep coming back to it.

How life has a funny way of bringing you full circle, especially when you try to run from that which is a part of you.

I thanked them for trusting me with their beautiful daughter and her dream princess dress.

In a good film, meaning such as this is implicit. There are usually swelling strings, a held close-up, the protagonist understanding something essential about their craft, about themselves, about the purpose of the work they have been doing all along.

The commission sits, even now, slightly apart from everything else. Not as a redemption or a justification but a dress made for a seven-year-old girl who loved princesses, which fit perfectly, the first and only time.

XI

17^th January 2022

The cheerful algorithmic cruelty of Facebook would intermittently remind me of an earlier version of myself. Photographs would surface entirely uninvited: fittings, workrooms, dresses that appeared to belong to a life proceeding in the correct direction. On post in particular announced itself like a ghoulish time stamp:

On this day, eight years ago, you were in Paris, at Haute Couture Week.

Eight years since the life I wanted shattered like a dropped glass of wine: the stem snapping, then the spread of it, then the stain that doesn’t entirely come out no matter how long you work at it.

Everyone else had moved on. The owners of my first fashion job were reported to the SFO. Allegations of raided pension pots, sixty million pounds of investor money unaccounted for, staff wages deducted and never passed to HMRC.

They blamed COVID.

The company was bought out by an American entrepreneur, the brand hollowed out and sold on like furniture from a house clearance. One fled, allegedly, to Dubai. The other launched a new label within two years, dressed a Queen for a King’s coronation, and returned to Paris Couture Week as though the intervening period had been nothing more than an extended sabbatical.

The industry received her back without complaint. It always does.

Six years since the corrupt designer quietly resumed making collections, then more, then showed in Paris, as if none of it had happened.

Certain distinctions were becoming difficult to ignore. Certain distinctions were becoming difficult to ignore. A slow, grudging concession from the dark: it becomes harder to maintain narratives built on distortion, harder to justify conditions that rely on your willingness to remain in them.

What becomes clear, eventually, is that the problem is not simply the industry, or the employers, or the luck, or the timing.

It would be easier if it were.

On this day, the 17^{th of} January 2022, I got sober.

XII

Into sobriety, I was doing bespoke bridal work, which was steady and mostly pleasant, and bridal alterations for a boutique, which was mostly not. I’d become part of something again, needed to the point where dresses were sold on the explicit condition that I would be the one to alter them. For a while, at least, I appeared to possess a certain wizardry.

I have let a wedding dress out seven times its original size. I have switched the tops and skirts of two entirely different gowns to satisfy the specific, non-negotiable vision of a bride who wanted the impossible and got it. I have taken a size eight and a size fourteen mother-of-the-bride dress and restitched them into a twenty-two, like some kind of deranged couture Frankenstein — a ‘Franken-frock’, as a friend later named it, which is both accurate and the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me in a professional context.

It was almost a business concept.

I have, on more than one occasion, recreated a gown entirely from scratch after it went out of stock, then sewn the original brand label back in, wrapped it in tissue paper, sealed it in cellophane, and packaged it with the reverent stillness of something that has never been touched by human hands — which of course it had, by mine, at an ungodly hour, with an embroidery needle between my teeth and the shipping box propped open beside me like a coffin waiting for its occupant.

Phantom Thread captures, almost accidentally, the strange intimacy of bespoke — the moment seamstresses take a client’s measurements, the hush of it, the odd tenderness. But it misses what comes after: that we become, without training or consent, unofficial therapists. Reading bodies like emotional maps. Tension in a bride’s shoulders. Grief in a mother’s posture. Anxiety moving through a teenager at her first fitting.

Ocean’s 8 (2018) offers a scene of surprising authenticity. When Anne Hathaway’s Daphne Kluger tries on a calico mock-up of her gala dress and spirals into a crisis about her appearance, Rose Weil calms her with practised grace.

“Look at you,” she says. “Why, you’re going to light up the sky.”

We see the muslin prototype, the proper first step of any couture gown. We watch the designer herself sewing. We witness that particular dance between client and dressmaker, the shared vulnerability of a fitting, where insecurities surface and trust has to be built before anything else can be.

I have stood in fittings while decisions were made about garments I had constructed, by people who could not have constructed them, with a confidence that seemed to feed on its own groundlessness. I have watched women praise a dress in front of a mirror, acknowledge that it fits, that it works, that it does exactly what it was designed to do — only to go home, discuss it with a mother, a sister, a friend, a voice on a phone, and return having reversed the conclusion entirely. The dress had not changed. The mirror had not changed. But the woman who had stood in front of it had been outvoted by a committee she hadn’t known she’d convened.

Sometimes the dress is just a dress. Sometimes it is a mirror, and they keep coming back hoping to see someone different in it.

It would take me almost three more years to leave this world entirely. The work brought genuine success and a solid reputation, and also unmitigated disasters and a bad one. I had charged fairly in all cases and undercharged in some, and I discovered more than once that the boutique owner was marking up my quoted alteration rates and quietly pocketing the difference, the client none the wiser. There is, somewhere in this county, a bride who believes I charge three hundred pounds for a hem lift. I would like her to know that I do not, and that I am sorry, and that it was not me.

But I learned something important about how this works, and I hold no real grievance about it. A salesperson is a middleman. They are, by definition, clueless about the thing they are selling and entirely motivated by the margin between what something costs and what someone will pay for it. This is not corruption; it’s commerce. It has worked, with remarkable consistency, for centuries — you need look no further than any headline involving a luxury conglomerate, a ticket reseller, or the housing market to confirm that marking up other people’s labour is not only legal but aspirational in the right circles. If someone has found a way to be wealthy within a free economy, that is, strictly speaking, their right to pursue. I disagree with it. But I understand it.

What I understood less clearly, for too long, was the more important dynamic underneath all of it. The salesperson stands between me and the client, takes their cut, and convinces everyone this is necessary. But they cannot do what I do. They cannot make the thing. They cannot fix the thing. They can sell a dress, but when the dress doesn’t fit, when the zip splits two days before the ceremony, when the bride has lost three stone or gained it, when the gown she ordered has gone out of stock and she’s standing in a shop in tears — I am the only person in the room who can actually help her. That’s not a middleman’s leverage. That’s mine.

I never quite knew how to price this. I think, if I’m honest, I approached it less as a business transaction and more as a kind of Make-A-Wish situation, which is financially ruinous and emotionally understandable in equal measure. Some of these brides were desperate in ways that had nothing to do with fabric. They had gotten themselves into terrible messes over their weddings, their families were awful to them, the whole enterprise had collapsed into something painful and expensive and very far from whatever they’d imagined. And I would think: if I turn this away, who picks it up? Does she deserve to go knocking on every door in the county, getting turned away each time, wandering further and further from any solution — like a pilgrim who has walked to the shrine only to find it locked, the custodian gone, no one left to hear what she came all this way to ask.

I knew, by that point, that she would be turned away. I had the reputation, the experience, and the specific, slightly unhinged willingness to attempt the impossible at short notice. So I always said yes. Usually for less than I should have charged. And I told myself this was generosity.

Or atonement.

Or both.

Walking away from cash in hand is harder than it sounds. My role within this system was not neutral. My strengths — patience, adaptability, a willingness to accommodate that bordered, at times, on self-erasure — are also the conditions under which I am most easily consumed. The industry does not create these traits, but it recognises them the way a river recognises a path of least resistance: instantly, and with the full intention of running through it until there is nothing left but a channel where a person used to be.

When the protagonist finally leaves the thing that’s bad for them, the credits roll and we get the feeling: relief, triumph, the clean exhale of a decision made. Life doesn’t do that. The bills don’t pause for character development. I vehemently disagree with premium pricing on bridal alterations and always have, but the industry will never stop being lucrative, and alterations — persistent, humbling, occasionally soul-destroying — paid bills that a support assistant’s salary could not do alone. So I stayed. For three more years, I stayed. Not simply navigating a difficult environment but participating in it.

I was the fabric as much as the hand.

This is the part the films rarely acknowledge.

Even films that peek behind fashion’s curtain reveal our collective blindness to craft. In The Dress (1996), seamstresses’ expertise is reduced to mechanical movements. Made in Dagenham (2010) shows the factory workers who formed fashion’s backbone, but their skilled labour becomes secondary to broader themes of workers’ rights. Personal Shopper (2016) haunts fashion’s periphery, its protagonist another indistinguishable labourer in the luxury ecosystem. Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1994) fixates on spectacle, relegating seamstresses and pattern cutters to backdrop. What they all miss — even Anderson’s exquisite direction — is dressmaking’s central paradox: every garment we create is designed to draw attention, yet our work must vanish. The perfect seam disappears. The ideal structure erases its own engineering. We are fashion’s ghostwriters, our signatures hidden in the very perfection of our work.

Coco Before Chanel (2008) treats Gabrielle’s seamstress years as mere prologue, rushing to reach the ‘real’ story of design and innovation. But any couturier knows: innovation happens at the worktable as much as the sketch pad, with timeless techniques born from seamstresses solving impossible requests. Fashion’s most dramatic moments are free of soundtrack, dramatic lighting, or audience: reinventing traditional methods because the fabric won’t behave; creating a structure to hold a beaded bodice without marking bare shoulders; constructing internal architecture that allows a woman to breathe, sit and dance while appearing weightless. Cruella (2021) transforms fashion creation into kinetic bursts of punk energy — a stylistic choice both visually arresting and problematically reductive. Each costume reveal feels revolutionary, even as quick cuts and attitude replace the nuanced skill of patternmaking. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) shows us the yearning and sacrifice needed to purchase a Dior gown but skims over the three-month construction period in a dreamy montage. This magic-wand approach to fashion work appears everywhere once you start looking for it.

Just as Whiplash (2014) captured the brutal physicality of drumming, Boiling Point (2021) showed us the raw chaos of professional kitchens, and Sound of Metal (2019) made us feel the precision of audio engineering, a film about real dressmaking could crackle with tension.

These aren’t stories of artistic torment or editorial ambition — they’re about the desperation of those who can’t afford to be artists but can’t stop creating, about passion and precarity that feels urgently relevant. They pulse with everything great films crave: high stakes, complex relationships, physical and emotional transformation, class tension, the conflict between art and commerce. There’s no ‘making it’ moment, no breakthrough show that solves everything. Instead, there’s the daily poetry of creation under constraint, the thriller-worthy tension of working with irreplaceable materials, the dark comedy of managing clients’ expectations and finding identity in work that demands invisibility.

One year sober, I secured a full-time permanent contract in a school and left fashion, or most of it — keeping only the bespoke bridal work that had intermittently kept the lights on and, more importantly, that I had actually chosen. I made two wedding dresses for my best friend’s wedding, because I wanted to, because she asked me to, because it turned out that was the version of this work I’d been trying to get to all along. I started a charity project to dress underprivileged kids for prom, for free, which is either a natural extension of everything I’d learned or a fairly pointed commentary on it, depending on your mood.

The commissions I take now are occasional and deliberate. A client I like, an idea I find genuinely interesting, a technical problem worth solving. It is not without its chaos. A client, mid-order, packed up and moved to Canada. Another relocated from Darlington to Cambridge and refused to attend further fittings, as though the dress would somehow finish itself across the distance. A large order of race day dresses upended my entire summer: the clients refused to pay deposits, turned my lounge into a vape den, used my sockets to discreetly charge their phones, and ghosted me when I queried the hundred-pound deficit in the envelope of cash they eventually handed over. I bought a record player with what remained and learned — belatedly, finally — a lesson in assertiveness.

The dresses contain less pain than before. Only the needle grazes and the iron scars, which are, at this point, proof that I tried.

My story, within whatever dress I’m making, is a phantom thread — unseen, but felt in the tension, in the cut, in the finish.

I moved into my own home, in the same village where my seven-year-old client had once lived. I run into her parents occasionally, the way you do in small places.

Every dress I’ve made since has been, in some small way, an answer to that one.

XIII

I teach fashion now. At least, temporarily.

Teaching has, unexpectedly, brought a different kind of clarity. It requires you to articulate processes you previously performed without explanation. To break down instinct into method. To describe, in precise terms, what it means to construct something well, and why it matters. It also requires a degree of honesty about the conditions students are entering — the gap between what is presented and what is practised, between the film and the floor.

I find myself, at times, repeating phrases I’ve heard before.

Learn to sew well. Learn to pattern cut. You will always have work.

I am less certain, now, about what that work will ask of them or how they will learn to cope with it.

Films like Phantom Thread and The Devil Wears Prada have become, if not accurate, then at least legible in a different way. I no longer watch them expecting to see my experience reflected back at me. I watch them as constructions — carefully arranged, deliberately incomplete, offering a version of events that prioritises narrative over process. Beautiful lies about beautiful dresses, told by people who have never had to deliver one in a Nando’s bathroom.

I remember leaving the cinema after seeing The Devil Wears Prada for the first time. I was thirteen, in the car with my aunty, and I asked her whether she thought Andy was right to leave.

“I suppose that depends on what you think she was leaving,” she said. “The job, or the person she was becoming.”

Twenty years later, it’s been a good year for fashion films. Angelina Jolie stars as an American filmmaker arriving in Paris for Fashion Week in Couture (2025), and Hathaway returns, the light that she is, illuminating not one but two perspectives: the titular pop star reuniting with her costume designer in Mother Mary (2026) and, now, the return of Andrea Sachs. I am, at the time of writing, hours away from seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2, and I find myself wondering, with a kind of weary, affectionate curiosity, whether it will continue to centre the visible layers of the industry, or whether it will acknowledge — even briefly — the work that allows those layers to exist.

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Thirteen years, three couture houses, and countless commissions later, the train lurches and my needle misses its mark. Having grazed the hem of fashion divinity, the disparity between film and reality hits like a physical punch: the camera should pan away from this strain-drenched unravelling, fade to black, cut to triumph.

Instead, Yorkshire arrives — field by field, grey by green, and somewhere in Harrogate, a bride is waiting for her dress.

XIV

In the fitting room mirror, I watch as the client sees herself transformed. The dress is perfect — they always are, in the end — though the phantom of catastrophe never fully lifts. Time restores itself, like stretched elastic finally released. All those frantic hours dissolve into this single moment of recognition.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “Worth everything we did.”

The word “we” catches, briefly, before it passes.

In the boutique’s portfolio, the dress will exist as evidence of taste, of curation, of a system functioning as intended. My part — the hours, the adjustments, the midnight anxieties, the physical toll, the desperate negotiations with material and time — will fade. Like chalk marks brushed from fabric. Like something that was always meant to disappear. Even my blood spot has gone.

That could be what fashion films miss most profoundly. They capture the dream that sustains us through the more challenging moments — the possibility that something transcendent can emerge from hours of detailed work, but never the addiction to making things precisely right, the way we pour ourselves into garments that will live lives without us, the peculiar peacefulness when you’ve been the hidden hand in someone else’s story.

I have made things that mattered to people. I have made things that did not. I have worked under conditions that demanded more than I was equipped, at the time, to give, and I have, at times, given it anyway. I have mistaken endurance for success. I have confused being needed with being valued.

And I have, more recently, begun to understand the difference.

There are all sorts of ways this story is supposed to end. In Phantom Thread, Reynolds Woodcock is left at the mercy of his muse, flat on his back, helpless and open, undone by the very thing that compels him to create. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy strides away from the town car and towards whatever comes next, while Miranda watches from behind glass, unreadable. I have been both. I have been in the car, watching the version of myself I wanted to become walk away, and I have been the one walking, aware of being watched, not looking back. I have been Reynolds on the floor and Reynolds at the table, sick and recovered and sick again, the cycle so familiar it almost has a rhythm.

Here, these films say, find yourself somewhere in this.

I head home, payment received. I nurse a non-alcoholic beer, quietly marking four years of sobriety while the adrenaline of another successful delivery fades. The rhythms of this work are still in me. The repetition. The attention. The impulse to fix, to adjust, to make something sit correctly where it previously did not. They do not disappear simply because the context changes. But they no longer define everything.

If there is a story here, it is not the one the films tell. But it exists. In the work that holds, even when no one sees how it was made.

Life is but a movie, but if it were, wouldn’t these blood spots and phantom threads make a damn good one?

And, what if — after all of it — that thread begins with me?

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Thank you for reading.

This concludes The Devil’s Thread. You can read Part I here.