1. For the Dreamer: The Gospel According to André
Trump's election is the through line of Kate Novack's The Gospel According to Andre (May 25), and it adds painful urgency to a story about Vogue's very tall, very black, and very flamboyant editor at large, Andre Leon Talley. Novack captures the cape-wearing dandy as he recalls his formative years and dreads the closing of the polls. Altogether, the documentary serves as a walk in the Gucci loafers of a man who fled the Jim Crow South to claim his place in the front row of virtually every major runway show. A staggeringly informed student of the industry, Talley reveals how his life has been a dream realized, an uphill journey first nurtured by the pageantry of Sunday church. "You can be aristocratic without being born into an aristocratic family," says Talley, who has ridden that philosophy to become an inimitable icon.
2. For the Purist: McQueen
If you mostly know Alexander McQueen as a high-glam deity who outfitted pop idols (Lady Gaga, Rihanna), Ian Bonhote's McQueen (July 13) will pull the gem-studded wool from your eyes. Adamantly unglamorous, the film unearths the modest roots of the fashion rebel, who parlayed his working-class London grit into a glorious career. Bonhote interviews those closest to the designer (teachers he outshined, loved ones he left behind), which greatly informs a portrait of a man more at home putting tire tracks on dresses than running the house of Givenchy. McQueen never wanted fame (its pressure contributed to his 2010 suicide), and Bonhote's documentary isn't always a treat for the eyes. But that's likely how McQueen, a dogged enfant terrible, would have wanted it.
3. For the Badass: Westwood
Vivienne Westwood is loath to rehash the past, as she makes clear in Lorna Tucker's Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (June 15). Still dressed in frocks torn at the edges, the 77-year-old visionary has always thrived best when capturing the zeitgeist, like when she was selling clothes in the back of a record shop at the dawn of the punk era. Tucker highlights Westwood's pluck as a strong-willed woman among men; she left her first husband, was betrayed by another partner, and then married a creative director devoted to her brand. The director also focuses on Westwood's triumph over adversity, charting her rise to stardom despite the mockery she endured from her contemporaries. "What's a fashion anarchist doing in bourgeois Paris?" a reporter asks. Changing the game, that's what.
4. For the Romantic: Love, Cecil
In Lisa Immordino Vreeland's Love, Cecil (June 29), narrator Rupert Everett reads from Cecil Beaton's diaries: "Some people seem to know their vocation instinctively; others wander in the labyrinth of choice." Beaton's labyrinth was enviably adorned, and, as this film attests, the photographer, illustrator, and writer's lack of one specialty begat a grand gift to us all. From artwork published in Vogue to homoerotic wartime photography to the entirety of My Fair Lady's visuals, Beaton's output cemented him as one of fashion's greatest, most vivacious Renaissance men. And while his much-discussed snobbery earned him enemies from Evelyn Waugh to Liz Taylor, we learn that an aching constant in his life was an absence of love -- a casualty of his unending search for beauty.
