In Fabric ends with the department store Dentley & Soper’s burning to the ground and every person who wore its cursed red dress trapped in a hell of their own making. After the dress kills Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who crashes her car after swerving to avoid two mannequins in the road, it passes to washing machine repairman Reg Speaks (Leo Bill), whose friends force him to wear it at his stag night, and then to his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires). Reg dies of carbon monoxide poisoning from his boiler after being hypnotised by the store’s TV advert, and Babs heads to Dentley & Soper’s wearing the dress just as the sale descends into a brawl between shoppers and full-blown looting. In the fitting room, the dress falls onto a heater and catches fire, and the blaze spreads through the store, killing Babs. Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed) escapes into a dumbwaiter with a dismembered mannequin and descends deep beneath the building, where she finds the catalogue model who first wore the dress, along with Sheila, Reg, and Babs, stitching together a new red dress from threads made of their own blood. Beside them sit several empty sewing stations, waiting for whoever wears it next. Back on the surface, a fireman sifting through the rubble finds the dress lying there completely undamaged.
Read our full review of In Fabric
What Happens to the Dress at the End of In Fabric?
Nothing at all – and that’s the point. The fire destroys the store, but the dress survives without a mark on it, just as it reappeared unharmed after a dog tore it apart earlier in the film. It was never really the store’s to lose. Throughout In Fabric, the dress behaves less like a piece of clothing and more like a predator, giving its wearers rashes, wrecking their washing machines, and floating above Gwen (Gwendoline Christie) to try to smother her. Dentley & Soper’s simply helped it find new victims, and the store refused to take it back when Sheila tried to return it. The fireman’s discovery suggests that the dress is about to find its next owner, and the empty seats in the sewing circle below make it clear that the store’s ghoulish staff, or whatever they serve, were always expecting more customers.
What Does the Ending of In Fabric Mean?
Peter Strickland’s film is, at heart, a satire of consumerism, and its final image is the most literal version of that idea. The people who bought into Dentley & Soper’s promise of a better life end up working for it forever, endlessly producing the very product that killed them. Sheila wanted to feel desirable again after her divorce, Reg and Babs were trying to start a life together, and the store sold all of them the fantasy that a single dress could fix things. It’s telling, too, that the dress fits everyone who puts it on, regardless of their size, the same way an advert speaks to everyone at once. Its victims aren’t punished for anything they did wrong, they simply wore the dress, and the store’s strange rituals around its mannequins hint that the shoppers were always the real sacrifice. The sale ends in fire and looting, but like the dress itself, the cycle of wanting more survives it.
