Who Should Decide What Women Wear?

“Phantom Thread,” the 2017 movie about a midcentury male designer and his younger female muse, unfurls as a cautionary tale about control gone wrong. In an early scene, Reynolds Woodcock (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) fits a dress on Alma (Vicky Krieps) and remarks that she has no breasts. When she apologizes, he responds: “It’s my job to give you some. If I choose to.” Creepy! The film’s writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson, portrayed the fictional Woodcock as an uncompromising perfectionist who didn’t care much about the humans wearing his creations.

Anderson based his exacting couturier on an amalgamation of larger-than-life midcentury male designers, from Cristóbal Balenciaga to Charles James. “I would keep seeing pictures of these couture houses,” Anderson told the British Film Institute, “and it was always a man with dozens of women behind him, in lab coats, doing his work.”