The September Issue
In the prickly world of fashion, few are allotted enough time to fully grasp what makes a seemingly frivolous industry the $300 Billion powerhouse that it is. A mere glimpse into that world leaves you as a mortal standing amongst a host of Greek gods. To understand the intensity of this world – the icons built – literally – from the ground up and the casualties left along the way– you need to be keenly aware of every decision being made behind closed couture doors. But with that being nearly impossible, the closest we can get is an insight into the person behind all of those decisions, if there even is a person to identify. Because Anna Wintour knows that she is less a person and more a manifestation of the industry as a whole: brooding, silent, undeniably influential. So when she sits in irritated silence waiting for an Yves Saint Laurent designer to show her the beginnings of a new line, her impatience is both palpable and understandable: Anna, like fashion, waits for no man.
“There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous,” she purrs in the film’s opening scene, in an accent filled with as much equestrian seriousness as there is ice-cold rancor. That same testament could be applied to Wintour herself, as the myth of her power, over both the magazine she lays out and the industry that lay before her, has now reached iconic status. It’s no secret that Meryl Streep’s deliciously cruel and Oscar nominated performance in The Devil Wears Prada was based on Wintour – a fact that everyone from Streep to Wintour herself adamantly denies. A variety of Prada’s name-checked designers and fashion notables even declined to appear in the film for fear of displeasing Wintour, furthering the rather concrete definition of her enigmatic power: the ability to control even those productions for which she has no role in.
And it’s that power that becomes The September Issue’s central focus, one that has the ability to either drive the fashion industry forward or halt it at her simplest of whims. Most quiver at her most basic of requests, citing it as the desires of a megalomaniac. But what director R.J. Cutler does is focus Issue not on Wintour herself, but the magazine she presides over like a cathedral’s head priestess. “More like the pope,” corrects contributing editor Candy Pratts Price in her fashion-savvy drawl, elongating all the ‘A’s of her words two syllables too many.
It’s industry clichés like those that prove to be true the longer Cutler fixes his gaze on Vogue as opposed to just the notoriously recluse Wintour. Likewise, during an intimate boardmeeting, where the staff discusses the unexpected revival of feathered garments as seriously as the discoveries of nuclear materials, – and with equal loathing: “What exactly do they expect us to do with these?” cries one editor. “Wear them,” another dryly retorts. – staff members throw around turns of phrase like “coat is the new jacket” with straight-faced seriousness. And why shouldn’t they? For Vogue, this is a matter of life a death: to remind them that “it’s not brain surgery, it’s fashion” would only further their stress, allowing daydreams of simplicity if they were to just follow through with a medical degree.
And it’s clear that Wintour likes it this way. But does this make her the ice queen, the Devil, she’s been painted as? No – it makes her an editor. And, from what Cutler shows us, a damn good one, giving Vogue half of its now famous totalitarian infrastructure. The other half belongs to Grace Coddington, the former British model whom, after a scaring car accident, took a job at Vogue (starting the same day as Wintour herself), eventually becoming their creative director and, as Wintour states, their resident genius.
Coddington manages to steal the show right from under Wintour’s dominating grasp, become the unsung hero of the magazine and, as a result, the film itself. Her befuzzled charm, preaching the rhetoric of an industry long since changed and emanating the essence of late-70s counterculture, allows her to be the middleman between Wintour’s illuminated throne and the throngs of workerbees that shuffle through the Vogue halls in mandatory high heels.
Don’t, however, assume that this means Coddington and Wintour permeate through a single lense. Far from it: Coddington may be the only voice that ever – ever – defies Anna’s now legendary orders. Where others hold their breath, partly out of fear and partly to allow Anna the appropriate amount of proximitized oxygen, Coddington is quick to disobey, even going so far as to admit she sometimes enjoys Wintour’s exasperation. In one scene, Wintour, perhaps jokingly, necessitates the airbrushing of an extra’s stomach in a photo (the extra, awkwardly enough, is the very cameraman filming the documentary). Coddington, desperate to maintain the ‘everyman’ juxtaposition in the high-glamour shot, quickly phones the retouch department, demanding they heed her order to cease any retouching, regardless of Wintour’s demands. It’s the equivalent of the unnoticed knight defeating the dragon. And it’s breathtakingly exciting – at least, far more than it should be.
But it’s their symbiotic, and arguably codependent, relationship that allows moments such as those to be exempt of any spite. Because what Cutler aims to show is that Wintour is only as good as Coddington allows her to be. It’s Anna who makes the decisions about what goes into her self-proclaimed bible, but Grace who provides her with the appropriate materials to make said decisions. In one scene, Coddington, while readying a model for a shoot, realizes that she is the last living editor to prepare a model’s wardrobe herself. It’s duties like those that grant the humble Coddington the title of ‘genius’. But it’s also those actions that force an indecent attachment to her work. Coddington’s gift is realizing the surreal, often fantastical, photoshoots that place Vogue above the rest. Wintour’s gift is her decisiveness, knowing when and how to actively moderate her enthusiasm.
And as viewers we can’t help but side with Wintour, regardless of if we really understand the decision being made. “That fur garment seems out of place.” Obviously – I mean just look at it! “Evening gowns are too overdone.” Sure, of course they are. “There isn’t enough color on that rack.” I suppose the rainbow is rather tame. We trust Wintour because while many have been quick to preach her abundance of authority, no one has ever been able to deny her intuitive brilliance. Predicting the death of the supermodel long before celebrities adorning the covers of magazines became, pardon the pun, en vogue, Wintour has managed to become the final word in fashion because she’s spent so long staying two-steps ahead of it. We are bound by Anna’s words because of the startling context she’s been placed in all these years before September Issue was filmed. So when Coddington whimpers at the realization that the world of Vogue has, much to her dismay, changed to alarming degrees (celebrity covers being one), we can’t help but assume that Anna simply knows what she’s doing. It seems just a little too late to introduce us to anyone else claiming they know it better.
Timing, in fact, riddles the entire film with deftly amounts of poignancy. Cutler chronicles the creation of Vogue’s now legendary September 2007 issue, which came in at a record breaking 800+ pages, the biggest in Vogue’s 114-year history. But we viewers watch this film in 2009, during the largest fiscal breakdown since the Great Depression, and during a time where the printed press is slowly going the way of the dodo. The people are clamoring with a demand so high,” says one Neiman Marcus executive, “that it’s outstripping the product.” Today, however, fashion houses are unable to spend the money to ship high-end couture to a country that rarely has the courage to proudly wear it. September Issue preaches the efficiencies of a time seeped in excess – one that serves as a sickening reminder of, perhaps, how we got into this mess in the first place.
But as Wintour herself reminds, “fashion is not about looking back, it’s about looking forward”. And after what seems like an ungodly amount of minutia-focused precision, the staff simply wipes the slate clean, and begins discussing October, taking only a brief moment to celebrate their record breaking success: over 13 million people are said to receive a copy of September’s Vogue, making it 1 in ever 10 women, an astronomical percentage. Coddington takes a look at the storyboards for the issue, counting something, but unable to get anywhere past “two”. Turns out, she was counting the number of spreads that she didn’t work on. She is clearly Cutler’s semi-protagonist, unfairly forcing one to label Wintour as the film’s “villain”, which is exactly what one would expect and Wintour would deny.
But there is an unmistakable fog that hovers over the film as we watch her exert her domineering control over every aspect of the magazine’s production: how then, after all, would Cutler ever manage to finish a film without her dominance rearing its head in the cutting room? It wouldn’t, and it’s perhaps alarmingly clear that the “fresh light” we’re supposed to see Wintour in is as orchestrated as the very photoshoots Cutler’s chronicled. But in one of the film’s final moments, Cutler pans over the final layout for the 2007 September issue, catching an image of an odd rubber dress from a “textures” shoot that Coddington had adored and Wintour had cut. Much to Coddington’s pleasant surprise, and ours as well, it has magically resurfaced, placed in the final print, bound for the newsstands. And it’s here that Cutler gives a subtle and remarkably untainted example of Wintour’s decision-making – one that could be argued for the betterment of the magazine or as a gift for a colleague. Could this mean the thawing of the ice queen? Like all of Wintour's decisions, it remains unquestioned.
Rod, this was a great read! Nice kicker at the end. I have chills.
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