"So many times I've wanted to crack up, standing there stiff while seven women are crawling round my toes fixing hems and the designer's having a freak-out because the denim cuffs are crooked. I'm on the verge of hysteria"

A backstage tableau of glamour stripped to its mechanical core emerges: the body as tripod, the face composed, the limbs immobilized while a cluster of hands scuttle at the edges of vision. The comic impulse, “wanted to crack up”, presses against a strict code of poise. Laughter is forbidden not because it offends taste but because it breaks the spell of control. To “stand there stiff” is to become mannequin and measurement tool, a calibrated surface for other people’s anxieties. Around the feet, seven artisans, anonymous, tireless, perform their micro-surgeries on cloth. The image of them “crawling round my toes” collapses the runway hierarchy into something at once intimate and unsettling: creative devotion literally at ground level.

Precision governs everything. A crooked denim cuff, comically trivial in ordinary life, becomes catastrophic under the runway’s magnifying gaze. The disproportion between cause and emotional effect, the designer’s “freak-out”, exposes the industry’s cult of detail, where a millimeter can threaten an entire narrative of perfection. Humor becomes a pressure valve, a way to stay human amid the theater of obsession, but it is also risky; laughter could signal disrespect, puncturing months of work and the fragile authority of the room.

“Hysteria” hangs on a knife-edge between laughter and breakdown. The word carries a gendered history: women pathologized for feeling too intensely. Here, that old stigma is repurposed as a snapshot of a system that demands composure while engineering conditions of heightened nerves. The model’s voice implies solidarity with the workers at her feet and an awareness of power’s choreography: the designer’s vision radiates downward; the body in the center must absorb it all without flinching.

The scene reveals fashion’s paradox. What the audience later perceives as effortlessness is born of collective contortion, timed to the second and measured to the thread. The impulse to crack up is a small, saving act, proof that inside the scaffold of perfection, a person is still there.