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It’s not very surprising that supermodel Dorothy McGowan retired from both modeling and acting just after her debut movie, William Klein’s adrenalized fashion-industry satire Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), came out. That isn’t because you watch the film and are convinced it must have been hell to make in an everlastingly soul-crushing way. It’s because the movie’s semblances of the fashion world only affirm that, even if they aren’t quite this cartoonishly terrible in life, to try existing within it exhausts so much more than it exhilarates that lasting even a week there could age you years. Of course she wouldn’t want to be here longer than she had to, you leave thinking. (Twenty-seven-year-old McGowan, who plays the title character, was by 1966 an industry veteran.) Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, which follows the eponymous fashion model character around as she’s put through various wringers, evinces someone great at what she does but also aware that that doesn’t translate to fulfillment. The movie is like McGowan’s kiss-off. 

The film was both McGowan’s first as well as Klein’s. Klein had risen to prominence in the 1950s as a top-line fashion photographer who counted the former as one of his favorite subjects. Though Klein’s movie never cuts that deep with its disdain for the fashion industry’s many trivialities, it’s clearly been made by people familiar enough to mock them in a way that bespeaks years of silent absorption, relieved probably only by commiseration with likeminded peers behind closed doors. Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? likely had a cathartic quality for Klein, even if it didn’t serve as an official industry goodbye the way it did for the presumably fed-up McGowan. 

The movie’s frenzied visual style is deliberately exhausting — like if you gave a fleet of paparazzi license to shoot a film without having to worry about their subjects attempting to swat them away. “Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?” has an in-your-face, in-a-rush look — overeager to jump onto the next thing and desperate to get there before it loses its steam. Paparazzi are usually, and not incorrectly, considered the most parasitic form of media. But Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? figures anybody wanting a piece of the symbolic title character is fundamentally the same, from the fashion editors exclusively speaking in hyperbole to the documentarians who arrive on the scene to answer the question the title poses, already having made up their minds what they think Polly should say. 

It goes without saying that nobody really wants to know who Polly Maggoo is. Her value lies only in what yields easiest to monetization, and if her untampered-with truths pose not much to capitalize on then there’s no real point offering them up. Fashion endures, as one character reminds us, because it changes — and what doesn’t change dies. To try to keep up is a losing game, and you don’t want to be caught lagging behind.