As many of the most chaotic viral stories begin, Taylore Scarabelli and Erin Grant’s new satirical short film, The Dress, starts in the midst of a wardrobe malfunction. Ashlee, a semi-viral influencer bound for the TikTok Awards, played by comedian Tessa Belle, is on a last-minute hunt for an outfit to wear (LoveShackFancy has rudely pulled out of dressing the Ugg-donning, Stanley cup-swinging girlie two hours before the event) at a hypercurated downtown Manhattan vintage store. There she embarks on a humiliating journey of getting dressed and… getting glued to a newly installed sculpture.
The Dress, which premiered at the Downtown Festival this past weekend, is Scarabelli and Grant’s first collaboration. Both women not only have their fingers on the proverbial young New York pulse, but also have a hand in creating it. Fashion writer Scarabelli struck out on her own in April after four years at Interview, while Grant made her bones as a filmmaker and editor working with the likes of Kim Kardashian, Adéla, and JT, as well as for brands such as Yves Saint Laurent Beauty and Spotify.
When the two friends dreamed up the film’s concept at an acting class, they knew it had to be both wildly specific and broadly relatable. The short’s setting and cast are quintessentially downtown, a story for the social media age: the shopkeepers are played by Manhattan comedian Gus Heagerty and Broadway performer Tomás Matos, costumes are by designer Claire Sullivan, and the vintage is curated by stylist Gabriel Held. But The Dress’s protagonist, Ashlee (is it appropriate to call an influencer an antihero?), feels universal, synonymous with any creator of any size in the short-form era.
Everyone knows an Ashlee, or is an Ashlee themselves. She’s the friend asking for too many pictures—all of which she hates—and subsequently finding new, unfounded insecurities about random parts of her body. She feels uncomfortable trying a new look, only to overcompensate when she does. She exaggerates her knowledge of niche artists—even if the terms “it’s giving” and “chic” are the boldest words in her lexicon.
“A friend of mine watched it and she was texting me horrified. She was like, ‘I’m Ashlee, this is fucked up, I relate to her so much,'” Scarabelli says. But that is exactly the point she and Grant want The Dress to make. “I was like, ‘We’re all her. It’s okay.'”
To celebrate the premiere of The Dress, Scarabelli and Grant sat down with actor, creative director, and Purple Magazine New York editor Bobbi Salvör Menuez to talk about the filmmaking duo’s stalker-esque meet-cute, how “no one’s safe” from being made fun of in the short, and why that’s actually pretty liberating.
Bobbi Salvör Menuez: To start, I do want to hear about both of your relationships to film prior to making this short film. It’s a directorial debut for the duo in a sense.
Erin Grant: This is the second fully narrative short that I have written and directed. My short prior to this that premiered a couple of years ago was a very different tone, a very different texture, very different visually, but I think it had some of the same DNA. I’m always really interested in what happens when your game plan falls apart and you’re forced to improvise under pressure.
I’m also an editor. I do a lot of commercial work. Prior to making shorts, I made a lot of, I would say, more experimental video-art-like pieces. I think they did have a certain thread of comedic absurdity that we honed in on in a more sophisticated way with this project.
I grew up in the absolute middle of nowhere in Wisconsin in a very culturally desolate environment. I had a subscription to Allure magazine that was like my lifeline to the real world, and then the VHSes that my parents had in their room. When I was being good, they would let me go up there by myself and I could watch a movie. Film and visual media from a very young age always represented this sense of fantasy and escapism from a life that I was not particularly inspired by. It’s always been a very charged and exciting medium for me.
Menuez: What about you, Taylore?
Taylore Scarabelli: I always had this idea in my head that I really wanted to be a bad actor in a bad movie one day. I didn’t really realize that I could be the one making that movie. Erin invited me over one day to work on a scene for this acting workshop, and then we were about to start and she was like, “Actually, I just wanted to ask you if you wanted to work on writing something together.” Erin [was] speaking to this attraction to these desperate characters—she had read some of my short fiction and had related to it—and we both aligned on that kind of theme. I think there’s an interesting push and pull between the two of us. We share the same sense of humor, but then we come at it from different places, so that was really cool.
I had no experience prior—working in film, making any movies or anything like that. But [it was] something I was always curious about and just didn’t know it was possible. As soon as we started writing together, I was like, “Well, I need to see this through.” My brain was just going. I was like, “This is so much like putting together a magazine.” When you think about filmmaking, it’s really about putting the right people together to make this vision a reality.
Menuez: I feel like there’s something about a duo where one person has more technical hands-on experience and one person doesn’t is often such a strong combo. This difference of perspective brings a dynamism to the direction. You were in an acting class together. Were you guys friends before?
Scarabelli: I have a good meet-cute story. But it’s one-sided. It’s kind of creepy. I remember like 10 years ago when I had first moved to New York, I was riding the J train into the city one day, and I saw this girl and I was like, Whoa, she looks so cool. I wonder who she is. Then a year later or maybe a few months later, I met her and it was Erin, and we became friends.
Menuez: What’s your side of the story, Erin? Did you reveal, Taylore, that you had seen her a year prior, or did that come later?
Grant: I didn’t know that until very recently. I’m clueless about you all the time, so that makes sense. I’ve always admired [Taylore’s] writing. She has such precision in her writing that I really respect and appreciate. That’s something that I felt was a missing piece. I had strengths visually and a tone and a feeling, but there was something in the writing that needed some sharpness and clarity. I really felt that she was somebody that I could get that from. I felt like it would be a good marriage of our skill sets. Then it just blossomed from there. Prior to that we’d had an out-and-about kind of friendship.
Menuez: From the point that you started writing together until now, how long did that process take for this thing to get legs?
Grant: We went through the process of getting financing, which I think added time. It was really great in that it gave us so many opportunities to really look at the project as a whole package and think about it from many different angles. I’m kind of grateful for the time that it took. I would say, has it been three years? Two years?
Scarabelli: I want to call it two years, but it’s probably been three. We’re both attracted to creating a world versus just capturing something. You can definitely see that in the film, but it requires a lot more of a budget.
Menuez: It doesn’t feel like you just caught whatever was happening. This precision that you talk about is felt in the place that the piece lands.
Scarabelli: We tried. The film ends up where it ends up, which is also cool.
Menuez: People always talk about films taking on a life of their own and having their own spirit guiding them to their own finish line on their own timeline. I’m curious, Taylore, what was different for you about scriptwriting as opposed to writing for magazines, or your own short fiction, or Substack?
Scarabelli: I’ve never liked writing with other people before. When someone’s in the Google Doc, you’re like, Get the fuck out. But this process was so fun. Honestly, pretty quickly we started writing a feature and then we had to dial it back. We needed to take a little sliver of this bigger story and just build that out.
In terms of fashion, I think the story itself comes out of what we see around us in the world and the desperation that everyone has. No matter what status you are or how successful you are, everyone is so insecure all the time and everyone’s judging each other. We wanted to capture that in a really lighthearted and liberating way. Everyone in this film is getting made fun of. No one’s safe. That’s important because we’re all kind of clowns in this fashion game.
Menuez: It reminds me of this way that you framed Paris Fashion Week one time as this “group humiliation ritual.” There’s this familiarity of the characters from basic to edgy, these people who are sharing space, but are perceiving the space that they’re in and how they relate to it really differently, in terms of culture-making creative fashion spaces that also have this commercial aspect.
I love the call from the agent [in The Dress] being like, “There’s $40,000 on the line, wake the fuck up”—this moment of, It’s not just about cool and the art, it’s also about money.
Scarabelli: Erin’s cameo!
Menuez: I love Erin’s cameo, honestly.
Scarabelli: We need more.
Menuez: Speaking of casting, I really liked seeing familiar TikTok stars, downtown faces. Can you talk about your casting process a little?
Grant: That was one of the longest departments to nail down. We started working with a casting director, who was really wonderful, and she cast Tomás Matos, who’s incredible in the film. That was our first cast, so that was what things were grounded around.
We had a hard time landing the other roles, and then we decided that maybe it would be worth just looking a little bit closer to home. I’m curious to hear [Taylore’s] experience of it because she really took the reins on it. Finding people that had some authentic connection to the scene and the experiences and the culture that we were writing about was super important.
I really was advocating for strong actors, people who are gonna understand how to work with material and be directed and remember their lines, but balancing that with people who are authentically from the place that we’re writing about. It turned into this very interesting mix of people who have varying degrees of relationships to those different parts of it.
To find somebody that’s perfect for someone that they’re not; that’s such an interesting task. It was frustrating and long, but it was also super fascinating to see all these different versions of our characters. It also really forces you to get clear on the essence of this character. What is that tangible thing that makes this person really come to life and feel like a lived-in, fleshed-out real person living a moment?
Menuez: The actor finishes making the character.
Scarabelli: I was like, “We need people who are around, and we need people who want to work, and we need people who are open to the humiliation ritual of it all.” I had done a lot of casting at my job at Interview. This is a big moment for people who are making their own short narratives online that are not traditional actors, but they’re acting, they’re creating their own stories, they’re comedians.
Tessa, our lead, she’s a comedian. She’s local, super fucking funny, and I had seen that she had been in a short at Tribeca [Film Festival] the year prior, and I was like, “Hey, we should talk to her.” She’s blonde, she’s hilarious. She could be our Ashlee.
Then Gus. He’s just so funny and it’s interesting because he comes from a theater background. He’s a director himself, but he’s such a good character actor and is really good at embodying these stereotypes of millennial people, whether he’s doing the yoga instructor or the gay server. So I was like, “Okay, Gus can kind of morph into whatever.”
The last person we cast was Star [Amerasu]. I’ve just done a feature with her in Interview, and she’s just really popping off with all her skits. I think everyone, since we’ve cast them, has been really popping off in their own way. We really locked in on a great group of people.
Menuez: We’re talking about [how] some of these actors are short-form, vertical content makers in this new narrative media landscape. What do you think about this more traditional film format in relation to that media landscape? Is it important that this is a film that’s viewed in a theater? Or is this a film that is also made for your second screen?
Grant: I’m thinking of the score. We worked with Aaron David Ross, who’s a really incredible composer, and when I think about the score, being enveloped by that in a theater feels like the right environment. But then, by the same token, we had so many conversations [during the film’s making] where I was like, “I just feel like that could be the perfect, like, watching it on your phone in the bath.”
Scarabelli: I don’t want it to be vertical. We have beautiful shots in there from Alex Gvojic. I do think we’re going to do more cutdowns so this can be consumed on Reels. I don’t mind if people are consuming just snippets of the film. But it’s also nice to have it seen the way it’s meant to be seen.
Menuez: Are you setting your sights on something more long form? What’s ahead for the two of you in terms of this directorial dreaming and making?
Grant: We’ve talked a lot about writing a feature after this based in a similar world. To me, it was the world building part of it and honing in on the humor, writing the dialogue [that] was my absolute favorite part of it. There’s so much more to explore. I’m trying to gather my thoughts about the state of comedy right now. I do feel like we’re living in such absurd times and [our] work has elements of this camp and absurdity. It feels so apropos.
I have a couple other projects of my own that are moving forward slowly but surely. One of them has a really similar tone. It’s a pilot set in the world of Los Angeles luxury real estate, an office of all-women real estate agents, but it has a very similar sense of humor to it, so that’s maybe a much more long-range goal.
Menuez: There’s something about this film where it would work as something episodic. Even the way it ends, I’m kind of like, Wait, what happens at LoveShackFancy? I need to know.
Scarabelli: We have talked about that a bit. Would this be a TV show? There’s so many other characters to explore in this world. Where we went in the beginning—this was just one pit stop on Ashlee’s journey. We’ll see! I will say something that was really inspiring to us was After Hours, so I’d still love to make a modern-day version of After Hours.
Grant: I’m so interested in this new vertical format [of shows]. My perception of them is: Somebody needs to make a cool version of them. There was one point in this process where I had thought about that a lot: making something social native.
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