Retail Nightmare: A Trip Inside Peter Strickland’s Sensorium

I first came to New York in 1994. I had a Greek aunt who lived in Woodhaven, and as a student I could get a ticket for £200, stay with my aunt, and get the J train to Manhattan. It was incredible. I’d go to Anthology Film Archives. I was seeing a lot of the Cinema of Transgression, like Where Evil Dwells, by Tommy Turner and David Wojnarowicz, which was very feral and almost like Gummo before Gummo. There were people like Tessa Hughes-Freeland doing these projected, abstract films with John Zorn, and J. G. Thirlwell doing live soundtracks, and M. M. Serra doing her work. Nick Zedd used to project films onto buildings across the street. If he couldn’t get a screen, he would just do it his own way. After growing up in isolation in Reading and not having that kind of community, it was just exciting to see that.

I also loved the sense of mischief that I got from Paul Morrissey’s films, which are really progressive. No one in his films ever says if they’re gay or straight; no one ever says if they’re male or female or if they’re trans. The use of nudity is also wonderful. Now you’d have to justify that, but it’s like, how can you justify Joe Dallesandro on-screen standing naked next to a welfare officer? It just works, and it’s wonderful.

The reason I set it then was because I wanted to have the mode of dating be these written personal adverts in the paper. I wanted Marianne to present herself in that little box. 1993 was perhaps the cut-off year before the internet became mainstream; after that, people switched to online dating. I used to love reading those adverts because you really have to put on your best show, so it was an ideal way of presenting her character. 

Jackson’s, the store in Reading that influenced the film, didn’t close until 2013—but even then it felt like you were going back in time. It was this mixture of Edwardian and Victorian Britain with the fifties, sixties, or seventies—but never beyond that. I wanted to have the contrast of the streets being contemporary with this time bubble you enter into in the store.

Absolutely, and that was always the direction I gave while working with Jo Thompson, our costume designer. I was also interested in how theatrical these department stores were. When I’ve been interviewed about In Fabric, I keep getting asked about giallo. I’ve obviously seen one or two giallo films, and my second film was loosely in that world, but it was not remotely on my mind. I’m not attracted to violence, but I am attracted to the flamboyance of those films, the heightened colors and production design. I didn’t know until recently that I’m prone to reacting to ASMR, so I used it consciously in this film because I remember the particular sound of those stores. They were very quiet—not like stores now, which are very loud—and there was the sound of the pages in these catalogues. That high-gloss paper—just the sound of the pages turning would trigger this intense relaxation for me. People mistake it as erotic, but it’s not; you just go into a bit of a zone-out.

I remember how thick the carpets were in those stores and how they muffled the sound of everything. I tried to use a child’s perspective, like when you’re a kid and you look at a dumbwaiter and you don’t know where it leads so you wonder if it goes all the way down to hell . . . or you wonder, do mannequins bleed? In the seventies, the hands on the mannequins were very splayed out, as if they were casting a spell on you. I also remember seeing garments that I didn’t know the purpose of. You’d see a suspender belt and think, what’s that? You knew it was something intimate, so there was a combination of the nightmarish and the erotic. When you’re a kid there’s no language for the erotic, but you sense the power of something beyond your comprehension. This film was an excuse to explore those visceral responses to clothing.