There’s a feature in this month’s Vogue about Rodarte, the fashion house led by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy.  They make singular, ephemeral garments that look as if they could be ripped off a girl by a good gust of wind.  The ones I’ve seen in person don’t seem tailored so much as assembled: from strips of leather, twists of fabric, feathers, baubles and trim.  And they don’t seem to be fitted to a woman’s body so much as wrapped around it and pinned in place.  (What does it feel like to wear one these dresses?)  The article praises the designers for their unusually artistic perspective and for building a thriving business in Los Angeles, at a distance from the media frenzy of New York.

Their current collection looks to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings for inspiration.  In its palette of shimmering, impossible-to-name golds, greens and blues, it’s faithful to the artist’s blooms and skies.  The dresses are all immaculately, inventively cut, and stunningly pretty.  And maybe that’s why I can’t, like the editors at Vogue, simply fall in love with the clothes.  They go down easy.  They don’t get at the crazy life in Van Gogh’s canvases; they simply adopt their colors and images.  Some dresses literally reuse parts of the canvases (sunflowers, a night sky) as prints.  The most successful outfits mix solid-colored pieces with evocative silhouettes to capture some of the graphic dynamism of the paintings.  But no garment gets at their raw physicality or emotionalism.  They’re drowned out in loveliness.

“Lust for Life,” Vincente Minelli’s 1956 movie about Vincent van Gogh, really delivers.  It gives us the love affair with the hooker, the tender patronage of brother Theo, the verbal flare-ups with Gauguin, the ear-cutting, and, in between all the drama, some painting.  It also, quietly and convincingly, recreates places from Van Gogh’s paintings, taking us to the outdoor cafe at Arles, the billiards table, the artist’s bedroom, and the field with crows.

Most remarkably, the film has actors, both in speaking roles and in the background, who resemble the artist’s portraits.  Kirk Douglas, who plays Van Gogh, doesn’t feel sufficiently tormented and inward-looking to be the painter, but he looks just like a self-portrait.  The minor characters are stunning.  The potato eaters, Dr. Gachet, the Zouave, the postman, they all come naturally to life.  The people who sat for Van Gogh must have been those who cared for him, and those he loved most.  Watching the film, I understood that the faces of the people around us are an integral part of our landscape.  They’re what the world looks like to us.