Should we care about Vogue magazine and its devotion to the fashion world? DANYL MCLAUCHLAN and BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM offer contrasting opinions.

DM: Some of the best documentaries only find their true subject while they’re making a film about something else and so it is with The September Issue, R J Cutler’s film that is ostensibly about Vogue magazine editor-in-chief Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour and the creation of the September Issue, the upcoming year’s style bible for the $500 billion dollar fashion industry. (“In fashion, September is January”, one fashion editor explains helpfully.)

And so it is for the first few moments of the film: we meet Anna Wintour, elfin, icy, hidden behind her trademark bangs and sunglasses, defensive and heavily botoxed who tells us that fashion is important, we see absurd outfits that tell us fashion is very silly and unimportant, we learn that this year’s September issue will be the biggest yet but find it hard to care – and then we meet Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director and the real subject of the film.

Coddington is a former Vogue model who moved into editing after a serious car crash; now in her sixties she is an endearing figure with a shock of frizzy red hair who we see lurching awkwardly around the offices of Vogue, responding to Wintour’s latest impossible demands, flipping through racks of haute couture (“Feathers! More feathers!”) while a cloud of models and designers fluctuates anxiously around her.

The tension in the film is in the classic conflict between commerce and art: Wintour is a businesswoman who sees herself as part of the entertainment media, she believes in using celebrities to sell magazines and advertising space; while Coddington is an artist – widely regarded as the worlds best fashion editor – dismissive of celebrity, still in love with the glamour and make-believe of fashion.

The film divides its time between the two of them. Wintour is defensive about her industry – her siblings all work in high-profile, ‘serious’ jobs (her brother is Patrick Wintour, political editor of The Guardian) and she feels they look down on her. Her daughter studies law and clerks for a judge, she too is dismissive of fashion. Such thoughts never seem to trouble Coddington, her photo shoots are clearly works of art; luminous dreamlike fantasies that Wintour keeps throwing out so she can fit in more celebrity photos. As a successful artist at the top of her game it would probably never occur to her that her medium might not be ‘serious’.

So if Coddington is the hero does that make cold, business minded Wintour the villain of the film? That’s how things play out for a while, but after watching a designer at Yves Saint-Laurent explain to Wintour that a heavy black jacket with a dark green weave is a ‘colour-piece’, or listening to the photographer for the upcoming cover shoot in Rome explain his detailed plans (“White! White! Everything will be white! White and also brooding!”) you begin to see that Wintour’s famously bad temper and icy demeanour are not so much character flaws as highly effective tools for getting things done in an incredibly flaky environment.

Cutler has filled his film with charming little touches: I like the way an assistant hurls herself out of Wintour’s way when quietly told to move, the camera man in the film crew gets incorporated into a photo-shoot, a model hungrily devours a strawberry tart. The movie needs moments like these – Cutler’s previous documentary The War Room showed us the brains behind the 1994 Clinton presidential campaign; also a movie about skilled professionals operating at the top of the game but Clinton’s team were playing for very high stakes. The only thing that’s at risk in The September Issue is whether or not it’s ready to go to press in time and with Wintour’s opaque, terrifying gaze watching over the production, although this is never really in doubt. Ah, but which photos make it into the final edition? Are there enough Nina Ricci dresses? Will Sienna Miller wear a wig? The achievement of The September Issue is that by the end of the film I actually cared about the answers to these questions.


BG: There are very few jobs which don’t come wrapped with their own type of bullshit, but you’d be hard pressed to come up with an industry with the special kind of bullshit fashion comes packaged in. It’s a world that utterly baffles me, and The September Issue leaves me cold as a result. But then again I’m not Vogue magazine’s target market, and this flippant review will serve little use for those who would happily pick up a copy to flick through.

Apparently September is the ‘big’ issue for Vogue, the time when the world’s most influential magazine stretches out its manicured fingers in time for autumn. The documentary follows the months leading up to the shoot, and gets startling access to many of the key figures involved. Most prominent are former Swingin’ Sixties model Grace Coddington, now Creative Director of Vogue, and Anna Wintour the ridiculously influential editor-in-chief of the magazine.

The latter is of course the subject in all but name of The Devil Wears Prada and the camera seems drawn to her face as if it carries some sort of magnetic charge. The only problem is she’s a caricature, a person whose life revolves around fashion to such an extent that the menacing, haughty persona she plays is just a type-cast role appearing to hide very little underneath. The remaining characters, with the exception of Coddington, barely escape the shadow of stereotype. You see a world like this and you realise Zoolander didn’t have to try very hard.

The documentary crafts a sort of conflict between Coddington and Wintour. The two started working at Vogue New York at the same time, and there are clearly some creative tensions. There are also stylistic differences, one is an immaculately presented postcard while another is a, comparatively speaking, dowdy dreamer. But the conflict rarely manifests itself except when Coddington keeps track of her photos, and the film is padded out with extra details which will interest those with a fashion bent and bore those without.

Composed of a few interviews, and mostly fly-on-the-wall footage, the film is aesthetically restrained. And for a film whose subject is purely aesthetic, the images could have been more dynamic. The documentary is scored with a trendy indie soundtrack (e.g. Ratatat, Of Montreal), but again style over substance. Wintour complains at the start of the film that the world ‘resents’ the fashion industry. On the evidence of this documentary, I’m not sure if it’s resentment. Resentment implies caring about that world in the first place.

See also:
» More with Less: the New Zealand International Film Festival 2009