In Fabric

• Strickland shot inside the genuinely defunct Allders of Croydon, a department store that had closed after roughly 150 years; the production turned the empty building into its base of operations and studio, which is why the store feels uncannily real.
• Although set in 1993, the team deliberately built a 1970s look into the film. Strickland's reasoning: department stores were already out of time, still trading on a '70s aesthetic decades later, right down to pneumatic cash tubes.
• The score is the first feature soundtrack by Cavern of Anti-Matter, the krautrock trio led by Stereolab co-founder Tim Gane, layering harpsichord under waves of analog synth, with non-diegetic whispering woven into the sound design.
• Miss Luckmoore is played by Fatma Mohamed, a Romanian actress who has appeared in all five of Strickland's features (Katalin Varga, Berberian Sound Studio, The Duke of Burgundy, In Fabric, Flux Gourmet); her florid, chant-like dialogue earned an International Cinephile Society best supporting actress nomination.
• The store coven performs an in-store ritual on a shop mannequin that has real pubic hair and a vagina capable of menstruating, a practical-effects choice so committed the film carries an end-credit for 'mannequin pubic hair.'
• The film world-premiered in TIFF's Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2018, where A24 picked up North American rights; A24 then gave it a single-day art-house run in December 2018 before its actual U.S. theatrical release on December 6, 2019.

The dress isn't haunted so much as the store is a predatory entity that uses the dress as bait. Miss Luckmoore and her staff aren't employees but a coven feeding the building; the mannequin ritual, the hypnotic TV ads, and the dress that keeps returning to the racks all point to retail itself as the supernatural appetite, with shoppers as offerings during the sales rush.

The two-part structure (Sheila's story, then Reg and Babs') argues the curse is really class and consumer compulsion passed down rather than a single villain. The dress moves from a Black divorcee to a working-class repairman; nobody escapes because the drive to buy, to fit in, to be desirable is the thing that kills, and the garment is just the vehicle that exposes it.

Reg's droning, technical monologues about washing machines literally hypnotize everyone who hears them, mirroring Miss Luckmoore's incantatory sales patter. Read together, the film suggests language, advertising copy and jargon, is the actual enchantment; the dress is just the product, and the spell is the pitch that sells it.

A blood-red dress moves from owner to owner like a curse with a price tag. Sheila, a lonely divorcee, buys it from Dentley & Soper's during a frenzied winter sale presided over by the impossibly verbose saleswoman Miss Luckmoore and her coven of staff. The garment refuses washing, raises welts, and ruins lives, then drifts on to a hapless washing-machine repairman and his fiancee. Strickland builds a ghost story out of catalogue copy, hypnotic TV ads, and consumer dread, where the real monster is the store itself and the ritual of buying.