I love Shopgirl. The film and the novella. I can’t help it. If you’ve never seen or read it, it’s about an insular artist, Mirabelle (Claire Danes), who works as a glove salesgirl at a high-end department store in LA. There she meets Ray (Steve Martin), a wealthy logician in the computer industry who wants to date her without the complication of, um, love. Jason Schwartzman plays a poor, boyish designer who’s into Mirabelle but really needs to get his ducks in a row.

Our discussion of shopgirls and class transformation inspired me to give the film another look. The film has been described by some as a kind of Pygmalion, but I think that’s somewhat misleading. In the film, Mirabelle works at Saks, a magical site where a financially challenged young woman such as herself can stare mockingly at reality TV stars, engage people from far-away lands, and be noticed by rich dudes.

Mirabelle has a classy, vintage-y look that she achieves, as Martin describes in his book, by mixing recycled clothing with Saks’s sale items (on top of which she can add her employee discount). As she dates Ray, he gives her presents which she mistakes for signs of emotional closeness. Many of these presents are clothing, and though Mirabelle’s essential sense of style remains the same -- lots of ‘40s and ‘50s style dresses, often floral -- one notices that the cuts of her costumes seem more updated and well-tailored.

No Henry Higgins, Ray appreciates Mirabelle’s fashion sense and never directs where her clothes should come from or how they should look, with the exception of one trip to Armani (Steve Martin’s Givenchy, you might say).

It is never overtly stated, but I think it could be argued that the confidence Mirabelle has in her new, expensive, better-fitting clothes (Danes, perfectly cast for this role, has a long angular body that reads as gawky, not anorexic) and the sense of self-worth she derived from having someone buy them for her, outlast her relationship with Ray and give her the guts to ditch her glove-counter job for a gig at an art gallery -- another site interestingly positioned in the film for inter-class mingling.