Look, on the positive side, Karen Gillan looks every bit as lovely as you'd expect in every shot. But that's not enough to sustain a movie as light as this!
The basic problem is we all know the story -- young turks storm in, tell those fuddy duddy oldies there's a new sheriff in town, fuddy duddy oldies get their come-uppance as they learn how fantasic the youngsters are at their chosen art. It's Mary Sue fan fiction on the big screen.
And the story doesn't become more interesting by claiming it (more or less...) represents some events that really happened fifty years ago.
A much more interesting story, for example, would have been one focussing on Lady Clare and the top editors at Vogue, with Bailey and Shrimpton as bit characters. Presumably they had been doing things a certain way throughout the late 40s and the fifties; presumably they had reason to believe things were changing in the world of fashion; but what were the conversations around this? A mercenary acceptance that a tidal wave of young money might as well be milked? An understanding that fashion runs in cycles, and the cycle of the next twenty years was going to be rebel without a clue? Terror that they'd never understood what they were doing, but they seemed to have a feel for what people wanted -- except now they no longer had that feel?
A film of a bunch of people sitting around a table, done well, can be riveting -- cf Conspiracy. A movie like that, with the head staff of British Vogue in 1961 puzzling out the situation in which they found themselves, and asking where the world was headed, and why it had changed, from the vantage of fashion -- now that's a movie that has serious potential for being compelling and original!
