Lesley Moon is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles with a particular interest in the poetics of photography and the energetic, semiotic morass of Hollywood and high fashion. She lives in the flats of Hollywood. She's looking forward to the new film "Coco Before Chanel."

I hate to admit it, but I will begin by saying that I have been into Chanel for a while. Yes, into Chanel, as one could be into Proust without having read the whole Recherche - with the wells of dumb-lust and dilettantish familiarity that word conjures. (One is able to speak generally, recognize the boucles and tweeds without their requisite histories and formal contexts within the house, and so on...). It is difficult to resist all that black and white, the perfectly proportioned black cocktail dresses with inscrutably elegant jacquard and chain interfacings, the enabled-feminine masculinity, the beauty of pearly costume jewelry piled high, and of course the preternaturally amusing trinity of Karl, his sunglasses, and his fan.

But in Los Angeles, fashion fandom is not cultivated without self-consciousness, which I have experienced ever since my youthful hand groped a lambskin glove in Giorgio's. I have been, in a sense, begotten as a cultural subject by an industry that bites its lip to see which story rises to the top of the box office every weekend, calculating the economics of cultural sentiment and seduction. The construction of image and culture has always been a known variable. As an L.A. native, the larger dose of critical distance from these products one could achieve, the more one was able to manipulate their offerings.

News of the forthcoming film, Coco Before Chanel, met me with a familiar, however generally repressed twinge of discomfort. Meant to enlighten us to the life of Ms. Gabrielle Chanel before she cut her first cloth, the adorable Audrey Tautou speaks to us as the artist at her most culturally transparent - the living youth of Coco! The pearl in that unshucked (costume) oyster! The vicissitudes of this type of film always make me squirm - we will see her determination, an uncanny knack for rendering silk faille, love affairs, France and the French. Mythologizing a woman who made buttons with the interlocked double C's of her name is almost an obligation, however swampy a period piece it might be, but I can't help but hope for a film that shows the self-reflexivity of her own position as a woman and a designer for women, living with vision and yet fully caught by the social compromises necessary to maintain her own success; to offer a sense of the cinematic gaze at work within it, Hollywood capturing a story not far from its own.

Inevitably I find myself desiring theatrical interpretation upon theatrical interpretation - so it goes in fashion, and Hollywood. Coco and I will have our tete-a-tete, and regardless of the affective dread I will not cease to feel for biopics, I'm betting the romance will sneak back in.

Photo: Sony Picture Classics