First-time feature filmmaker Michele Maher's tepid satire aims to skewer Garment District types but can't settle on a tone, which leaves it careening between mildly barbed in-jokes and sitcom silliness. As a 1970s adolescent, budding fashionista Grindy Malone coveted a pair of trendy Poncho Ramirez jeans, which her sensible mother refused to buy. Now it's the early '90s, and Grindy (Katie MacNichol) is in New York to break into fashion. To her amazed delight, she gets a job assisting Ronnie Grossman (David Thornton), Poncho Ramirez's business manager. But the House of Ramirez has fallen on hard times and his latest innovation — men's briefs that promise a "criminally large" silhouette — is a flat-out disaster. Pragmatic Ronnie is reduced to considering a deal with cut-rate huckster Ira Gold (Jerry Grayson) to unload the padded man-panties and stave off bankruptcy. Spunky Grindy gets a make-over from her new best gay friend, Jasper (Jason Butler Harner), wins points with Ramirez by boldly suggesting that he revive the designer jeans line and wins over Ira Gold, now a partner, with her girl-next-door enthusiasm. Haughty design director Franca Fortuna (Saundra Santiago) and her assistant, Rimi Stone (Gretchen Cleevely), are the lone holdouts against her disingenuous charms. Franca and Rimi do, however, throw themselves into masterminding a provocative campaign for the new PR Jeans and Franca approves a blatant parody of photographer Larry Clark's notorious "white-trash kiddie-porn" ads, which caused Calvin Klein such trouble back in 1995. Meanwhile, as Grindy's star rises, her eyes are opened to the back-stabbing, one-hand-washes-the-other reality of her chosen profession. Will she make her peace with the seamy side of fashion, or hang onto her ethics and abandon her dream? Aspiring entertainers are often advised that "dying is easy — comedy is hard," but someone should warn them about satire, which is harder still. Maher spent several years in the fashion business, though you'd never know it from her timid jabs at such broad stereotypes as shallow, self-absorbed homosexuals and crude garmentos, which she apparently understands as a euphemism for "money-grubbing Jews." But the real trouble is the ill-defined Grindy; Maher apparently couldn't decide whether her protagonist was a modern-day innocent adrift in a dirty town or a rag trade Eve Harrington opportunist learning to use her immaculately lacquered claws. Without an assured character at its center, the movie quickly collapses in a heap of moldy clichés and contrived (and not especially funny) situations. --Maitland McDonagh
