“Maybe we’re not making fashion,” Adi Gil muses in “threeASFOUR: Full Circle,” putting together an outfit for New York Fashion Week that even by the standards of the premier showcase where it’s commonplace to push the envelope, the designer threeASFOUR is doing things differently. Their collection for winter 2012 when director Sean Ono Lennon and co-director and cinematographer Brian Gonzalez began filming took unusual inspiration in crop circles, reimagining a dress as a fractal that wraps around the body and Gil is in charge of executing the vision when Gabi Asfour, one of her two partners in the label, waves off any concerns about how what he might’ve sketched actually ends up adorning a person, saying “I don’t have that interest.” What the two are working on with partner Angela Donhauser are inevitably described as clothes, but labels are not something that comes easily for the trio who besides not thinking of what they do as consumer goods, all come from international backgrounds where they’ve found specific branding limiting.
Given Lennon’s involvement and a cameo from his mother at the threeASFOUR show, it’s generally a good idea to keep in mind not to judge a book by its cover in the potentially glossy “Full Circle,” as the film visits with Gil, Asfour and Donhauser over the course of a decade after they’ve become a sensation in the fashion world yet not a sustainable business, looking like true artists not in the innovative designs they’ve created but hanging on by a thread in a nook in New York’s Chinatown where they have to fend off a landlord’s plans to raise rent and force them out of the building. The experience is disorienting when press around their shows has been effusive and Bjork and Rihanna have donned their designs, yet fashion sense hasn’t translated to business sense and it turns out their initial partner Kai Kühne bowed out when the demands of the latter took its toll after he initially staked the company. (As he says, “Certain things get attention and certain things sell,” noting those don’t necessarily go hand in hand.)
You are meant to marvel at the creativity that threeASFOUR comes up with as state-of-the-art 3D printing has made their intricate geometrically complex outfits even possible, but the film admirably doesn’t glam up the practical concerns that extend beyond how one of their creations will actually be worn as each seemingly successful presentation of their work is followed up immediately with questions about its commerciality. (Even when the trio are explicitly told that their latest collection is more commercial than they’ve done before, it sets expectations that they are bound tone disappointed by.) When diversity is their greatest asset – the fact that Adi is Israeli and Gabi is Palestinian is a point of pride, though it seems just as notable that the two ended up complimenting each other when the latter is a designer and the former started as a stylist – that has the potential to become a liability when they have different attitudes towards accommodating the financial needs to move forward with their art and the time Lennon and Gonzalez put in allows the frustrations to emerge without ever feeling overdramatic.
That can prove to be a bit of a double edged sword when even with the pressure that principals in threeASFOUR face both in putting together a show or in finding ways to pay for it, the film doesn’t have any obvious narrative propeller when there isn’t any doubt that they’ll stay afloat (particularly when the film introduces them in the present before cutting back to 2012). Still, the story itself doesn’t feel like it’s been told in exactly this way before when all it seems threeASFOUR can do is carry on and working through the stress simultaneously reveals the strength of the collaboration as well as where it is tested by things the trio never could be prepared for, with the film shedding light to ideally illuminate the tensions for others headed down such a path of maintaining integrity in the face of sustainability. Rather than offering up an inevitable montage of yearly collections some time in the middle to impress with a continuum of reinventing their style, “threeASFOUR: Full Circle” curiously saves it until after the credits where it isn’t only the threads that impress, but by then, a full appreciation of the effort it takes to simply keep going, perhaps demystifying the process, but making it all the more astounding.
“threeASFOUR: Full Circle” will be released later this fall.