Angelina Jolie's Couture Examines the Threads That Hold Us Together

Couture is ostensibly a film about Paris Fashion Week, but as its star and producer, Angelina Jolie, and director, Alice Winocour, tell it, it's really about what holds us together. The title is a play on the origin of the word “couture,” which means to stitch or to sew—both literally speaking, in the film’s world of haute couture, and figuratively, in its subject matter.

In Couture, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025 and arrives in U.S. theaters on June 26, Jolie stars as Maxine Walker, an American indie horror film director tapped by a luxury French fashion house to make the opening video for a runway show. She’s a fish out of water, questioned on her own clothing by brand representatives and her creative choices by her artistic director (Louis Garrel), admitting her indifference toward fashion as an industry early on. She’s also dealing with issues back home—she’s in the middle of a divorce, and trying to reconnect with her teenage daughter, who isn’t taking it well.

A breast cancer diagnosis in the middle of it all forces Maxine to reconsider what she values most. But while Jolie may be the film's anchor, she's only in about half the scenes. Much of Couture interweaves the stories of those working hard to make fashion week happen: a makeup artist from Ukraine who dreams of being a writer (Ella Rumpf), a South Sudanese model hiding her new career from her father back home (Anyier Anei), and the seamstress tasked with creating the show’s final gown, who works so much she doesn’t have time to eat (Garance Marillier).

For both Jolie and Winocour, the film was deeply personal. Winocour is a breast cancer survivor, and was first inspired to write the movie after a visceral experience stepping out of a hospital in Paris into the glamorous but overwhelming crowd outside fashion week. Jolie learned she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, putting her at high risk for both breast and ovarian cancer, after losing her mother and grandmother to both illnesses. She underwent a double mastectomy in 2013 and an oophorectomy in 2015, and has been a public advocate for preventative care ever since.

Below, the pair talks about setting a film about cancer in the fashion industry and how we use clothes to tell stories:

Fashion week feels like an unlikely setting for a film about mortality and human connection. What drew you to it?

Alice Winocour: I like the idea of this world of appearances, and seeing behind the perfect images. When the fashion world is looked at, it’s mostly from the perspective of an artistic director, and mostly men. I wanted to see the real life of all the workers. It’s also about how you can connect with people coming from distant worlds, the idea of someone going through a very tough time, but in the middle of a glamorous little world.

Angelina Jolie: When we go through whatever it is we go through in life, what we need is to be empathetic towards each other, to know that everyone’s coming from something different, that everyone has something happening in their life you don’t know about, and that we are all interconnected.

How did you find the stories of the seamstresses, the makeup artists, the first-time models?

AW: The stories we see are part of the life of real women I’ve met. I spent a year and a half backstage at fashion shows writing the script. I met girls coming from Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia to do fashion week in Paris and Milan. It was beautiful to work with real workers. We shot in Chanel’s Atelier Haute Couture, and it's the real seamstresses that were playing their own parts. We did a screening at Chanel where they were recognizing themselves on screen, people that are not looked at usually. And they were so touched when Angelina visited the atelier. It was very moving.

AJ: They were wonderful to work with. Having a film that’s very global, with characters and actors from different countries, speaking different languages, it’s very much the world today, and hopefully we’ll see more of this. It’s finding what we do have in common, even if we are from so very far away.

The film isn’t as much about the fashion world as it is about how people present themselves, and how we use fashion. Sometimes it’s where we hide. Sometimes it's something we're covering. Sometimes people are lost in some kind of camouflage of self. Sometimes it's a form of expression. At the end of the day, couture is stitches, the stitches in the body and the material. Certainly a woman's body is at the center of this for all the characters, but it's body and mind.

At the start of the film, your character is asked to describe her feelings about fashion, and she says, “useless and necessary.” What’s your answer?

AJ: As an actress, I love a costume. Wardrobe character very much helps me create a character, whether it be Maleficent or something. I think I push my characters, and I love playing in that way.

As a person, I discipline myself to have a very small closet. I don’t want it to be too centered in my personal life and my way of being. I love the aspect of fashion that encourages people to create, explore, and express. I don’t love the aspect that tries to say somebody isn't good enough, or that pushes something that you have to have, or some way you need to be, or a kind of judgment. That can lessen creativity and individual expression. So I think I like fashion very much. That's why, sometimes, I don't love the industry.