"You ever been to a fashion show? It's a sort of pagan ritual, a ceremonial dance where the faithful sit around sipping tea and worshiping clothes. There's a sacrifice involved, too. $1,500 for a dress, so help me. . . ."

--Gregory Peck, as a sportswriter married to a fashion designer in the 1957 film "Designing Woman."

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When the lights came up after a screening a few weeks ago of Robert Altman's latest film, "Ready to Wear," a journalist in the third row turned to the fashion editor sitting next to him and said, "Those clothes weren't real, were they?" He was referring to the tartan kilts and figure-distorting bustles that, in the film, are the provocative designs of Cort Romney (Richard E. Grant).

"Oh, sure they are," the editor chirped. "That's all Vivienne Westwood."

The reporter couldn't believe his ears any more than he believed his eyes. What looked to him like fantasy costumes never intended to be worn were actually the clothes that those who attend the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections in Paris, Milan and London--'the faithful," as Gregory Peck called them in "Designing Woman'--stand up and cheer about. What seemed to this guy to be visual jokes are the styles that fuel fashion, the uncompromised visions of one of the world's most respected designers.

This man, like Peck's character, must be forgiven. He is not a fashion person. He is not a member of what has been called "the cult of the initiated." But that makes him a lot more typical an audience for Altman's new film, which opens Christmas Day.

Audiences who are not acquainted first hand with the world of high fashion are not likely to believe their eyes, either, as actors like Lauren Bacall and Tracey Ullman rub elbows with such real-life designers as Christian Lacroix, Gianfranco Ferre and Jean-Paul Gaultier. What's real (editors finding their hotel rooms full of flowers and gifts upon check-in) and what's fake are all mixed up for this big-screen fashion farce.

But that's usually what happens when it comes to putting the fashion industry on film. It is a case of one business of artifice trying to capture another business of artifice--cosmetically concealed warts and all. Throughout the years, when Hollywood turns its cameras on the fashion industry, the pictures that emerge are glamorous to be sure. Like the fashion show sequence filmed in color and plugged into the black-and-white world of George Cukor's 1939 version of "The Women," fashion injects pizazz into a film. But film isn't always so kind to fashion.