Posted: 02/25/2009

Fashion Victims (2009)

by Sawyer J. Lahr

A delightful German queer film with romance, marital feud, and fierce competition. A fashion forward mogul, Steven (Roman Knizka), goes head to head with Wolfgang (Edgar Selge), a prudent man of the old school of women’s fashion. While Wolfgang’s marriage gets rocky and he squanders his son’s college savings to make payments on a brand new automatic car, Karsten (Florian Bartholomäi) falls in love with his father’s rival.

There is something to love about all of the characters in spite of their respective flaws. Wolfgang fights over the outdated clothing brand he sells to boutique owners and insists that his competitor, Grazilla, owned by Steven, is wrong for selling cheap apparel manufactured in South Korea and falsely labeled to fool women into thinking they’re wearing a smaller size.

The young and manipulative sales representative, Steven, makes some abject assumptions about the psychology of women and fashion. His male beauty and charm make his shallowness forgivable when he is chasing after Karsten, a high school senior who misses his trip to Spain with his best girlfriends and has to chauffeur his father to meet clients that Steven is stealing. “Fashion Victims” is a coming-of-age tale about more than the blossoming of a young gay man, but his father who refuses to come of age his own way in midlife.

Sawyer J. Lahr is Chief Editor of the forthcoming online publication, Go Over the Rainbow. He also writes a monthly film column for Mindful Metropolis, a conscious living magazine in Chicago, IL.

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