Editrix Of The Trade | Anna Wintour coolly surveys another flock of frocks in The September Issue.
THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE
Directed by R.J. Cutler. Opens Fri, Nov 6.
****
Grace Coddington’s heart is breaking.
Not over a man — in fact, the documentary The September Issue doesn’t tell us anything about her personal life (if indeed she even has time to pursue one) — but over the September 2007 issue of Vogue, the fashion magazine where she holds the title of creative director. She has overseen a beautiful spread featuring Hilary Rhoda and Coco Rocha, inspired by Brassaï’s images of Paris in the 1920s, and the photos have turned out exactly the way she hoped they would: backlit, in dreamy soft focus instead of the “pin-sharp” look that’s all the rage now, much to her dismay.
But it seems every time she looks at the wall where the issue is being laid out, another couple of pages have been cut out of it. “I’m furious,” she tells the camera as she returns to her office. She’s not the type to throw things or raise her voice — if anything, she registers emotion by swallowing her words even more deeply — but you can deeply feel her frustration all the same. This is not a trivial matter: this is fashion.
Of course, Coddington is powerless to do anything about her spread because she works under Anna Wintour, the brilliant editor who’s been running Vogue since 1988, exerting enormous influence over the fashion industry and causing hundreds of underlings and assistants to quake in their shoes. Her most important project every year is the conception and production of the September issue — that’s the one the size of a phone book, the one read by some 13 million people and which sets the tone for what women will be wearing (or wish they could be wearing) for the next 12 months. The September Issue takes an inside look at the production of what was then the largest issue of a monthly magazine in publishing history: 840 pages, and Sienna Miller on the cover for some reason.
It’s fascinating to watch Wintour at work, pushing 60 but still girlish-looking in her sheath dresses and pageboy haircut, omnipresent cup of Starbucks coffee in one hand as she examines photo arrays and calmly rejects what to the untrained eye look like beautiful pictures. (Coddington grumbles at one point that in just a couple of minutes, Wintour threw out some $50,000 worth of her work.)
And yet, director R.J. Cutler is mostly unable to penetrate Wintour’s sphinxlike exterior — except for a couple of revealing moments where we sense her disappointment at her daughter’s lack of interest in becoming a Vogue editor. In another interview late in the film, she talks about her brothers and sisters, who are all involved in various social and political causes, and ruefully remarks, “I think they are very amused by what I do.”
But those moments of vulnerability are rare, and instead, Grace Coddington emerges as the film’s heroine — the second-in-command, the right-hand woman, the woman whose name nobody knows but without whom the magazine would probably be unable to function, loyal and hard-working, even as her creative vision is thwarted and frustrated at every turn.
With the magazine going to press on Thursday, she’s the one who pulls together a brilliant last-minute reshoot on Wednesday — which, as it happens, contains one of my all-time favourite fashion photos, the one with Caroline Trentini, all in purple, ponytail flying, jumping in the air and looking straight into the lens of a movie camera. I had no idea the cameraman in the photo was a member of Cutler’s crew, and Coddington was the one who insisted the magazine’s retouchers didn’t remove his stomach paunch. The woman’s a genius!
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