The September Issue : A Vogue / Anna Wintour Documentary

[MissMagAddict]

source | nytimes.com

August 23, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
By Maureen Dowd

The Last Empress

The Devil does wear Prada.
I ended up sitting a stiletto’s throw away from Anna Wintour at the Monkey Bar, after the Museum of Modern Art screening of the new documentary about her. Nuclear Wintour looked summery in a floaty print Prada dress so au courant it hasn’t yet hit the stores.
Just like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” Wintour can be seen in the new film clutching a Starbucks cup in her office and the back of her chauffeur-driven car. It seems to be her only sustenance, so I was curious to get the skinny on what the Skinny One eats.
“I’ll have what she’s having,” I told a startled waiter, who assumed I was kidding and pointed me to the part of the menu he thought suited me better: Chasen’s chili and Mrs. Carter’s butter tart.
“Anna eats steak and burgers, protein, and drinks a little wine,” said the Vogue editor André Leon Talley, mesmerizingly mountainous in a navy Armani with a white saber-toothed tiger tooth necklace and Manolo framboise velvet Woodstock sandals.
The documentary by R. J. Cutler chronicles Anna and her courtiers compiling the September 2007 issue of Vogue. Setting a record at 840 pages, 727 of them ads, and weighing as much as a preemie — 4 pounds, 9 ounces — that issue is now detritus of the Golden Age of excessive spending.
So the question invariably arises: Behind those bangs and dark glasses, is Anna human? Or did she tie Hermès scarves together and make a daring escape from District 9 in a getaway car driven by Oscar de la Renta?
On CBS’s “Early Show” on Thursday, Talley said it was a misconception that “she’s an ice floe or an iceberg and that she has no human flesh or bones.” Tom Florio, the publisher of Vogue, concedes in the documentary that “she’s not warm and friendly.”
At the screening Wednesday, towering with gorgeous girls in bondage gladiator heels and threaded with famous designers, one designer not favored by Anna muttered that she was a sartorial Star Chamber who smothered creativity.
David Letterman will probe Monday night to find out if Wintour is as frigid as we think. But there’s no need for her to drop the Cruella de Vil guise. Moviegoers want to see a brittle Anna belittle, Simon Cowell-style. We enjoy the editrix as dominatrix.
She’s a sacred monster, an embodiment of the highest standard of style, and we don’t expect our monsters to be nice.
“She’s the Sun King and you don’t want the Sun King to act like the mayor,” says Gioia Diliberto, a fashion writer for The Huffington Post.
Just like Miranda Priestly, who dismissed her assistant with a cold “That’s all,” Anna frostily murmurs “That’s it? There’s nothing else?” as she surveys photos and clothes and prods a staffer: “It’s Vogue, O.K.? Please, let’s lift it.”
She dresses down one editor for “sameness,” deems a Sienna Miller cover photo too toothy, and tells designers they should “edit” and be more exciting. Looking at a picture of a slender Jennifer Garner, Anna says ominously, “She looks pregnant.”
Her lovely daughter makes light of the gravity at Vogue, saying, “Some of the people act like fashion is life.” Indeed, the Vogue priestesses choosing glamour spreads in “The September Issue” seem just as intense as the soldiers in Iraq defusing bombs in “The Hurt Locker.”
There is friction in the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards relationship between the 59-year-old Anna and her closest collaborator, the 68-year-old flame-haired creative director and former model Grace Coddington, who is the only one willing to tweak “the Pope,” as Anna is dubbed by a staffer. Coddington tells French Vogue, “We have a real mutual respect for each other, even though sometimes I feel like killing her.”
The Vogue team and moviemakers didn’t know they were dancing on the deck of the Titanic. This September, ad pages in Vogue plummeted 36 percent and a Wall Street Journal story trumpeted “Thick Fashion Magazines Are So Last Year.”
The real question about Anna is not whether she’s warm — she has her furs for that — but whether she can stay relevant in a more down-market age and stay happy if she can’t continue to throw away $50,000 photo shoots that are not up to her exacting standards. In the new issue, there’s a small bow to democratization. A piece called “What Price Fashion?” allows that “overpriced fashion no longer makes sense” and features an Oscar de la Renta dress for under $2,000 and a Proenza Schouler executive touting the “very best skinny stretch-twill pant you’ve ever seen” for $550.
Anna herself continues to resist egalitarian impulses. As Keith Kelly wrote in The New York Post, Condé Nast may be slashing costs, but Anna is not scaling back at the upcoming fall fashion shows in Europe. She’s keeping her suite at the Paris Ritz, her chauffeured Mercedes sedans and her entourage of 10 that costs a quarter of a mill.
That’s all.

 

[kasmslo]

^ Sorry but that article make me cringe. Do we have to continue the exhausted DWP euphemisms? I hope I'm not the only one who doesn't find it amusing.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

^Agreed, hated it with passion, badly written and corny, the comparison to soldiers in Iraq and Vogue staffer's is insulting to say the least.And then she ended it in the same tacky manner.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Ah well... you have to take the bad with the good I guess. I wonder what Anna & her people thought of it?

I'm anxious for Letterman anyway!!!

 

[Miss Dalloway]

Oh for sure, its not the first bad article about the film, or the last haha.And yes Wintour on Letterman will be um interesting, still cant believe its going to happen.

 

[dlsdivine4]

Oh for sure, its not the first bad article about the film, or the last haha.And yes Wintour on Letterman will be um interesting, still cant believe its going to happen.

Letterman and Anna seem like oil and water. He makes snide remarks to get something out of his guests and she's pretty blunt. Should make for good television

 

[helmut.newton]

Call me crazy but from what I saw in The September Issue, I don't find her to be particularly 'bitchy' or a 'devil'. I was actually surprised by how nice she was. She was amicable with her staff when need be. Obviously, when there were tough decisions to be made, she came off as being a little 'bitchy'.

I think people have created this dramatic persona for her and are more scared of the character they created, than they are of the real Anna.

The only time I thought she was bordering on cruel was with Stefano Pilati when she clearly disliked the collection and she would rudely suggest it. But other than that, she was what you'd expect a normal boss to be, no?

 

[Acid]

i saw the movie it was amazing,
it really makes your realize how anna just has an office job thats kinda cramped and repetitive. its probably a lot of fun to begin with but can you imagine month after month, year after year?

 

[sbey]

Saw it yesterday in Sydney. It doesn't really give you much of an idea about what makes Anna tick, but it's a very entertaining romp nonetheless. One of the few revealing moments is when she describes how her siblings consider her line of work to be "amusing". It's interesting too seeing how her daughter Bee is nothing like her.

The highlight for me was definitely seeing Grace at work. I thought she stole the film.

 

[kiD GQ]

Call me crazy but from what I saw in The September Issue, I don't find her to be particularly 'bitchy' or a 'devil'. I was actually surprised by how nice she was. She was amicable with her staff when need be. Obviously, when there were tough decisions to be made, she came off as being a little 'bitchy'.

I think people have created this dramatic persona for her and are more scared of the character they created, than they are of the real Anna.

The only time I thought she was bordering on cruel was with Stefano Pilati when she clearly disliked the collection and she would rudely suggest it. But other than that, she was what you'd expect a normal boss to be, no?

I concur. I found her more humorous than scary and cruel. Like she continues to say, she is decisive and that is a good damn thing. She doesn't have to be cruel, everyone is already afraid of her for no apparent reason. But in the September Issue most of the staff seemed more of a discomfort or uneasiness with her than fear.

 

[LittleJ]

I am excited to see this film! To wait until October 16th is too long ^^

 

[SaidTed]

Did anyone else see Anna on Letterman promoting the film? When if you could be fashionable on a budget, she said she was going to Macy's in Queens for FNO. The way she said "Queens" and "Macy's" was hilarious (@ 5:10) ! The whole interview was hilarious and ackward, check it out below!

 

[b9409]

Will go and see this today, and I am debating if I should take my 2007 September Issue to the theater to make a better sense of the movie, or at least review the issue again before the movie... to remember things. I remember the fashions and general trends (feathers were big, right?), but specific editorials I cannot quite bring back for some reason.

The glorious 2008 made me forget 2007 season. Isn't that very sad about fashion? But 2008 was too special to forget.

 

[MON]

The premiere night was featured in a newspaper in our country. The feature has like 3 full pages

 

[LolaSvelt]

I can't wait to see this film.

 

[nijuyanah]

Very excited to see this! They showed a little preview about it on some Austrian News TV and it defenitley intrigued me.

 

[Fiercification]

^ Is it gonna be on in Austria soon? Because I searched the Net and couldn't find anything

 

[BerlinRocks]

from artforum ...
sorry it déjà posted ...

Amazing Grace
08.28.09

THEY ARE AN UNLIKELY COUPLE: editor in chief Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington, numbers one and two on the masthead of the most influential fashion magazine in the world. While Wintour is the face of Vogue, and her celebrity is what will sell R. J. Cutler’s The September Issue, Coddington steals the movie. Cutler, who earned his documentary credentials producing Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s The War Room (1993), has an eye for unlikely seducers. As James Carville was to Pennebaker’s behind-the-scenes look at the 1992 Clinton campaign, so Coddington is to The September Issue. I hope she forgives the analogy.

Like The War Room, The September Issue is a process documentary. It follows the six-month production of the September 2007 Vogue, which at 840 pages—the number blazoned on the cover—was the largest issue in the magazine’s history. Whatever the reasons for the year-and-a-half lag between the date Cutler finished shooting and The September Issue’s premiere at Sundance in January 2009 (it shouldn’t have taken seventeen months to cut together fly-on-the-wall HD footage with Sex in the City establishing shots unless the contractual fine print defining “final cut” was stickier than usual for the fly), the delay has yielded an unintended irony. No one on the screen seems to have a clue that anything other than the weight limitations imposed by US Post Office would interfere with the next issue being even bigger. Instead, the September 2008 issue was down forty-two pages, and the current issue’s page count is a mere 584, the number still a defiantly eye-catching element of the cover design. In the fashion world, heavier is better only in regard to the poundage of the book.

As with any glossy magazine, including Artforum, advertising is what determines page count. Of those already legendary 840 pages, 727 were ads. I take that number from no less an authority than Maureen Dowd, one of some half dozen New York Times writers who have used the movie as an opportunity to weigh in on all things Wintour, thus contributing to the publicity bonanza that The September Issue has been for Vogue. Wintour is a brilliant businesswoman who understands how to use the influence her magazine wields over shoppers to convince retailers and designers that advertising in Vogue is a necessary element of their marketing strategy. There is very little in the movie that depicts how Wintour accomplishes this. A glimpse of her fielding a softball question about designers’ tardiness at Vogue’s annual breakfast for retailers; a couple of words of praise from senior VP and publishing director Thomas Florio; a few seconds of a Condé Nast staff meeting during which chairman Si Newhouse can be seen in profile—that’s about it for the symbiotic relations among editorial, publishing, and marketing divisions. Nor is there any analysis of the power of fashion in contemporary culture. (For a brilliant depiction of how fashion was used to economically and politically cripple a fractious bourgeoisie, put Roberto Rossellini’s 1966 The Taking of Power by Louis XIV in your Netflix queue.)

Insubstantial though it is, The September Issue has its pleasures and even revelations. First and foremost, it does away with the myth that everyone who works for Vogue is physically perfect. There is most obviously the girth of the great André Leon Talley, who is here relegated, in two brief scenes, to the role of court jester. High-definition is an unsparing medium: I really didn’t want to be as intimately acquainted with the pores on Johnny Depp’s nose as Public Enemies (2009) forced me to be, but it was deeply liberating to see that tiny shadow of UFH (undesirable facial hair) above Wintour’s upper lip. Wintour is by far the least eccentric looking and most soigné of everyone in Vogue’s editorial offices, where, aside from a few excursions to Paris, London, and Rome for photo shoots and to cover the European collections, the movie is largely located. “Everyone can’t be perfect in this world. It’s enough that the models are perfect,” says Coddington, refusing Wintour’s orders to eliminate the paunch from a photo of Cutler’s cameraman, Bob Richman, whom Coddington impulsively included in one of her spreads. Coddington enlists the film crew as allies in her daily struggles with Wintour, and her sotto voce asides to the camera are expertly timed and very funny. “I love to talk money in front of you guys with Anna,” she confides after Wintour has insisted that she reshoot an entire spread, “because it drives her crazy and it’s a sure way to get the budget up.”

Wintour and Coddington’s diametrically opposed aesthetic sensibilities—an opposition essential to the success of the past twenty years of American Vogue, not to mention this movie—manifest in their respective presentations of self. Wintour always looks armored, even in the arm-baring clingy print dresses she favors in the office. Her signature bulletproof bob hides both her forehead and her jawline—the areas of the face where gravity and/or the surgeon’s laser most often do their work. I’m pretty sure she eschews Botox, since, within a limited emotional range, her face is extremely expressive. She exhibits as many variations of the disdainful glance—coupled with the withering remark—as Eskimos are said to have words for snow. It will be unfortunate if aspiring editors with less talent but a similarly sadistic streak take her as a role model.

Coddington, on the other hand, combs her shoulder-length mane of fire-red frizzy hair straight back from her high forehead, baring every line, crease, and sag that time has wrought on her parchment-white skin. Already eligible for Medicare when the documentary was shot, she is that nearly extinct creature—a woman who looks her age on-screen and is ravishingly beautiful because we can see her entire life in her face. When Coddington was a teenager in a Welsh convent school, she escaped into the fantasy world of Vogue because, she says, “she loved the pages.” Her modeling career in London was cut short by a car accident that left her with scars around one eye. After working for British Vogue for twenty years, she was hired by American Vogue, a week after Wintour became editor in chief.

One of the last hands-on stylists at a major fashion magazine (she dresses the models herself), Coddington favors a soft-focused, backlit romantic look that she fears has gone out of favor. “Everyone seems to like things pin sharp these days,” she says regretfully. Her work, she explains, is based on creating a fantasy around the models. Fashion stories like “Texture!” or “The Jacket!” are merely pretexts. Coddington (creative talent) and Wintour (editor) go at each other as nastily as Labour and Conservative party members in British Parliament, although each of them admits at various points that the other is the best at what she does. Coddington credits Wintour with “seeing the celebrity thing coming before everyone else,” and although she hates it, she knows that by putting celebrities on the cover, Wintour pumped up sales. “You’ve got to have something to put your work in,” Coddington explains ruefully. “Otherwise it’s not valid.”

I became a Coddington devotee after I saw a spread in a 1989 Vogue where she played clothes made of leopard-skin-print fabrics against archival images of Chanel and Schiaparelli wearing the leopard-fur hats they made famous and a 1966 photo of a model sitting across a dinner table from a leopard wearing a napkin around its neck. The caption for that last image reads: “Fortunately for the big cat, it was around this time that imitation fur reached its state of near perfection.” Coddington went on to publish, in collaboration with her partner, Didier Malige, The Catwalk Cats (2006), a charming illustrated fantasy about the adventures of their five companion felines in the world of high fashion. Vogue, however, did not replace the skins of dead animals, long a staple in its pages, with simulations. In fact, after PETA put a dent in the profits of the fur industry, Wintour almost single-handedly revived it by putting fur back on the covers of Vogue from the mid-’90s on. Missing from The September Issue are glimpses of Wintour and Coddington arguing directly about things that matter, like fur, and maybe celebrity as well. Explaining her relationship to Wintour, Coddington says, “I know when to stop pushing her. She doesn’t know when to stop pushing me.” I imagine that Cutler must have felt the same.

The September Issue opens in New York on August 28 and in Los Angeles and select cities on September 11.

 

[TREVOFASHIONISTO]

I saw it and I loved it...it made Anna seem so human
and i felt so bad for even though she seems so selfish n
wants her work only to be in ther lol....we met Andre outside the movie theater too
he was sooo funny an overall great experience

 

[Franzy]

I won't be able to watch this in the cinemas because they won't feature it here. My only hope is the internet or DVD. :whistle: