The September Issue, 2009
This documentary follows Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of
Vogue, as she and her staff prepare for the September issue of the magazine, a sprawling, hundreds-of-pages publication that sets trends for the fashion year.
I'm not what you would call a fashionista, but I do think that the fashion world is interesting. I also enjoy a behind-the-scenes look at an event, and this film delivers nicely.
Anna Wintour was infamously the inspiration behind Meryl Streep's character in
The Devil Wears Prada. When asked by the documentary crew what her greatest strength is, she quickly answers "decisiveness". We see this in action all through the film, and Wintour green lights or throws out various outfits, images, and ideas, all while walking the line of still respecting her contributors.
Interestingly, and understandably, the documentary crew really seems to have fallen in love with a woman named Grace Coddington. Grace is a former model and now works as a photographer for many of
Vogue's high-end fashion shoots. Frequently over the course of the movie Grace and Anna clash over which of Grace's photos will be included. As Grace explains, the older she gets the harder it is to see her hard work discarded. At one point, she notes that the photographs that were rejected amount to about $50,000 worth of investment.
I think it's in Grace's work that you feel the most tension between the artistic and the commercial elements of the fashion world. The purpose of the magazine is to highlight fashion trends, but it's also to get people to buy clothing.
In a sequence I found really interesting, they take a photo of the documentary's camera man in profile with a model. The note immediately comes down that the camera man's belly needs to be "retouched", ie they want to digitally erase the slight pooch of his belly. When the camera man repeats that he was told he needs to hit the gym, Grace is visibly upset. "You don't need to be perfect," she says, "Isn't it enough that models are perfect?" She gets on the phone and gives a direction that the camera man not be edited to look like "some skinny male model". Before this scene, we learned that Grace's own career ended when she was in a bad car accident that permanently damaged one of her eyes. The movie never gets into the idea of how fashion magazines perpetuate certain body types or definitions of beauty, but it's there on the edges of a lot of scenes.
Then there's just the interest of watching different people dance around and negotiate in a highly hierarchical system. Andre Leon Talley is on hand to provide some of his signature over-the-top personality.
A solid documentary, though your interest will vary based on how much you're into the world of fashion.