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Backstage at a John Galliano show, Vogue creative director André Leon Talley declares that fashion isn’t art because it’s hard work — the kind of hard work, he points out, so much more gritty than glamorous that it would be silly to romanticize it. Catwalk (1995), the documentary giving him the mic to say something like that, seems motivated to guide us to the same conclusion. It follows Christy Turlington, just 25 when the movie was being shot, across three weeks and three cities (Milan, Paris, and New York) in 1994 as she participates in major fashion shows. 

Contrary to Talley’s conclusion, I still finished Catwalk thinking that fashion looks pretty glamorously artful, but I concede — though I can’t say I’ve ever really thought it wasn’t — that it also looks like hard work. The impression one gets, watching Catwalk, is that even though Turlington’s life comes with the perks of good pay, traveling opportunities, and the chances to work with great artists and meet cool people, it’s also a life where you have to keep it moving, always being whisked somewhere and then being whisked another place before you’re able to get settled in the original somewhere, to the point that the thing you might desire most is just sitting down and not having anything to do. (Because even when you’re sitting, you’ll likely still find people coming at your face and hair trying to make it do things it couldn’t naturally.) “There’s no way to completely adjust to this kind of life,” Turlington says late in the movie. “You sometimes want to stay in one place for a very long time and never move and never have to see anyone.” 

Catwalk was directed by Robert Leacock, the guy who did the cinematography for two of the 1990s’ best documentaries in or adjacent to the fashion industry: Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), which followed the eponymous pop star through the rain-drenched first few days of her iconic Blond Ambition tour up through its conclusion, and Unzipped (1995), which essentially sat on the shoulder of designer Isaac Mizrahi as he worked on a collection following the hostile reception to his last one. (Having seen Unzipped for the first time only recently, seeing Mizrahi appear a little past an hour into Catwalk was like bumping into an old friend.) 

Though those movies’ tasteful black-and-white home-movie look carries over, Leacock doesn’t have even an iota of the sharp narrative instincts of Alek Keshishian and Douglas Keeve, who respectively directed those two movies. Catwalk sometimes has an incomprehensibility that can make it feel more like collage work than anything resembling a story. But Leacock is about as good at getting his subjects to feel comfortable in front of him; he’s an unobtrusive fly on the wall wise enough to know that if you hold still and quiet, you likely won’t get swatted at. (Keshishian and Keeve had the disadvantage, for vérité’s sake, of subjects who, though giving you a lot of themselves, were clearly also doing a fair amount of hamming it up for the cameras whether they were conscious of it or not.) 

It probably goes without saying, given its unfocused narrativizing, that Catwalk fails as a meaningful study of Turlington, the industry around her, and the various other famous faces and fellow supermodels in her orbit. Instead, it leaves you unmoored in a fast-moving world difficult to navigate unless you’re seasoned like Turlington. (Who, following her discovery as a teenager by the photographer Arthur Elgort, had been in fashion for about six years when the film begins.) Catwalk is a study of a hectic lifestyle. 

Catwalk is fun to watch despite how tough it is to get your bearings, though how much fun you have is contingent on how much seeing designers and supermodels caught up in the various whirlwinds of chaos in which they find themselves appeals to you. I happened to find it pretty appealing — something like Kate Moss running around in Anna Karenina-style ball gowns while “Rise of the Valkyrie” plays charms me — even if ultimately it leaves me with less insight than additional, pretty-to-look-at fashion-visual ephemera.