It’s powerful when women lift each other up. It’s even more powerful witnessing women root for one another when they’re surrounded by men who bring them down.
Alice Winocour’s Couture (2025) is a portrait of womanhood through beauty and pain. She studies the ideas of what we can live for while showcasing three individual stories as they pass through the same world.
Written by Hailey Passmore
In the world of Paris Fashion Week, women are at the heart and centre. Maxine Walker (Angelina Jolie) is preparing to direct her next film, one that has taken a lot of hard work to be able to complete. But before this, she has been invited to shoot the opening for a fashion show segment. While in Paris, she receives an unexpected and unwelcome breast cancer diagnosis. Ada (Anyier Anei) is a young woman from South Sudan who has traveled to Paris to escape the predetermined life her father has set for her. Within moments of arriving, she realizes the fashion world may be less welcoming than she originally hoped. Then, Angèle (Ella Rumpf) is an unknown French makeup artist who is left working in the shadow of these big fashion shows, with only the hope of escaping this life and doing something bigger.
From the very beginning, it is clear that there are personal connections between actor and character, specifically when studying the emotions coming through Jolie’s facial expressions. Not only is she a director in real life, but she herself has also experienced the pain of a cancer diagnosis from her mother and grandmother, as well as having gone through a double mastectomy. Winocour makes it clear that the stories of these three women created for Couture were inspired by the two actors - Jolie and Anei - themselves.
Even with this added emotional layer connecting character to actor, Couture fails to connect these stories together in a coherent way. It becomes a broken-up tale that tries to showcase female empowerment, but falls short in that it does not connect the women enough. As the three women only come near each other in passing, there is no clear connection made between them and their stories. The film follows one timeline, but the stories feel like they belong in their own film and not wrapped together through the world of Paris Fashion Week.
There is, however, true empowerment in how these women lift each other up as the men surrounding them and their professions continue to put them down and try to put them in their place. They are focused on telling these women that they cannot do something, or towards the audience, it seems like they do not believe in these young females. Couture is clearly a film made by women in a positive way because it wants its female leads to succeed. Winocour wants Maxine, Ada, and Angèle to perhaps not succeed, but come to terms with their environment and end the film leading towards more positive situations than when they began.
It is clear to the audience that Winocour crafted a film focusing on female stories and empowerment. However, it is the way in which it was finalized that falls slightly short of what could have been an even more successful story. Choosing these three strong women as her main protagonists worked in the film’s favour. Jolie, Anei, and Rumpf all no doubt have talent within them and bring humanity to each woman, something that is required for a film such as Couture.
With its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2025, the cast and crew graced the audience with their presence and joined in on the screening. After the film, a thoughtful Q&A helped wrap up Winocour’s process and explained the meaning behind her movie.
Photo: Courtesy of TIFF
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