It’s worth noting that the Walker Art Center is screening a series of films by an important filmmaker, artist, and fashion photographer, William Klein. Unfortunately, I failed to note the screening of Klein’s seminal fashion flick, Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo?—a 1966 film that’s currently on loop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with its Model as Muse exhibition. Although Maggoo screened at the Walker last week, I finally got around to watching my screener last night. 

In all, I thought it was a smart but wildly unfocused film with occasional clear-eyed social assessments that are relevant even today: a fashion editor with a penchant for making hyperbolic decrees whom people secretly call “Dragon Lady;” a seemingly glamorous super model whose vulgar tastes are revealed when a television producer makes her the subject of his documentary; the fact that fashion is regarded by some as damaging and frivolous, whereas it brings great joy to the live of others. But I’m certain of this—Klien has not a modicum of sympathy for those people (mostly women) to whom clothes mean so much!

Klein was an artist as well as a commercial photographer for U.S. Vogue between 1955 and 1965. He wasn’t particularly interested in clothes but simply used the gig to further his study of photography and, over time, inadvertently stumbled upon some innovation. On the heels of his Vogue experience, he produced Maggoo, an un-loving indictment of an intellectually and emotionally vacant fashion model. But he never stopped tossing stones at the fashion industry. Go see for yourself on Friday night, when the Walker screens a documentary retrospective of Klein’s oeuvre—it includes some of his fashion photography. Then ask the man himself on June 26, when Klein will speak as part of the museum’s excellent Regis Dialogue series.