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Luca Guadagnino got one solitary thing right during a recent talk: He made a lot of enemies.

He knew it was coming. The director of After the Hunt, Queer, and Challengers was expounding on what he sees as the difference between fashion designers and costume designers, a point of view that is as dumb and as wrongheaded and as sweepingly dismissive as that old canard that women aren’t funny. Here’s the full transcript of the clip posted to Business of Fashion’s Instagram account.

 Costume designers, and I’m gonna create enemies here, tend to think in terms of the garment. Designers of fashion think in terms of the body, who wears them. And that is a huge difference for me. And I think that is what makes costume design from people like Jonathan [Anderson] or in my collaborations with Raf [Simons] or Giulia Piersanti, it’s that you eventually can find the character and the person, not just the character.

And it’s about dynamism, the way they look. And if you think of Jonathan, Jonathan did Challengers. The thing he said to me first was like, “America is about display of capitalism in everything they do,” and particularly the world of tennis is that in America. So he did something that nobody expected. People were expecting the great bravura of Jonathan with shape and form, and in fact he was very into the characters and into the world and the economics of the world.

So the fashion designer didn’t do his fashion designer thing, he did… costume design. What the actual fuck is this man on about?

One of the smaller points that I find so puzzling about his statement is that fashion designers have done movies long before Jonathan Anderson put Josh O’Connor in an I Told Ya shirt. This is not a new phenomenon, nor are they noticeably more successful than costume designers who do not do fashion lines.

Givenchy’s work with Audrey Hepburn and Yves Saint Laurent’s clothes for Catherine Deneuve in Belle Du Jour are stunning, iconic, instantly recognizable—but they are hardly better storytellers than, say, the suit and turban that Patricia Neal wears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Armani’s suits for American Gigolo blew up the nature of menswear while catapulting Richard Gere to the A-list, but those suits stand side-by-side with Joseph G. Aulisi’s costume for Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor in terms of style and substance and character exposition.

There’s also the much larger issue here: Guadagnino’s assertion that costume designers think only in terms of the garment, and not the body wearing it. For me, Guadagnino’s blithe comments send a message that he considers fashion designers to be artists and costume designers as seamstresses, jamming their precious creations on actors and shoving them out onto set like Mama Rose pushing Gypsy Rose Lee into her first striptease. It’s so deranged I’d laugh if I weren’t also infuriated.

To take one obvious example of dressing the character and the body (and for the record, I cannot believe that I actually have to do this): What the hell did Adrian do with Joan Crawford’s broad shoulders except exaggerate them into stylishness? Her MGM years saw her play plucky young strivers (even when she played wealthy, she wanted something more), and those shoulders helped her get it. Edith Head turned Barbara Stanwyck into a clotheshorse in The Lady Eve by designing specifically for her overlong torso, fashioning clothes with high waistlines and plenty of exposed midriff. I am a gay man who majored in film history; I could go on!

Or if “for the body” meant for the character as detailed in the script, that’s even more absurd. Theadora van Runkle’s costumes for Bonnie & Clyde. Jenny Beavan’s costumes for Cruella. Ann Roth’s entire filmography! That’s just off the top of my head when I think about movie costumes that visually define a character in seconds, both for the audience and for the actors. Not to mention the incredible, impeccable work done on TV series year after year by artists at the top of their game.

The reaction online was swift and merciless. Jenny Beavan herself commented: “I can only add I am thankful he will never want to work with me!”

“Sir, you are entitled to your opinion, but the obvious contradiction in your statement makes it apparent you have no understanding of the Art of Costume Design,” Kate Hawley commented. And Arianne Phillips wrote, “[C]ouldn’t disagree more. Sweeping generalizations such as this are never respectful when you are speaking to artistic collaboration. Clearly this is Luca’s experience, perhaps it is direction and approach. Every costume designer like every director has their own perspective, process and interpretation. Extremely offensive to a whole craft that Luca clearly does not respect. Very disappointing.”

My personal favorite comment: “That’s why among all his films the only costume that stood out was Elio’s peach.”

Leonie Hartard DM’d me on Instagram to say, “I am a costume designer. And yes, I am raging about this! I have 20 years experience in the industry, and it’s been tough. Mainly because a lot of the time I have had to fight to have my role validated and my skills and hard work respected. The ignorance of this statement astounded me. Costume Designing is storytelling and is integral to an actors performance. It is multifaceted. All I can say is he better be good to Mr Anderson, because I can’t think of a single costume designer I know who would ever set foot on one of his sets after this statement.”

I interview a lot of costume designers because I love talking about style and clothing as weapon, as armor, as inadvertent admission—all powerful storytelling devices. And I have also worked at companies where costume design stories were a tough sell. (Cinematography stories were never, ever, not once a conversation beyond, “Approved.”) So I am singularly positioned as an outsider to be enraged by this dismissive, giggly tone. He says fashion designers do something that costume designers don’t, before describing them doing the exact job of a costume designer.

Some people just can’t help showing their full ass. But what do you expect? As the Costume Designers Guild pointed out in its #PayEquityNow campaign, “You’re naked without us.”