R J Cutler (2009)

Watching the Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour in operation in this fly-on-the-wall documentary, I was struck increasingly by her determination to be decisive for the sake of it – or for the sake of exerting her unquestionable authority.   We may be meant to assume that her lightning-fast brain, combined with unerring instincts for what looks good, means that Wintour’s instant pronouncements on clothes and photographs are infallible but I kept wondering why she didn’t sometimes take a little longer to make up her mind.  She seems so hellbent on getting her own way that she has to express an opinion immediately, and dare her staff on American Vogue or the contributing designers or photographers to contradict her, and hardly any of them dare to.  (The men are much worse:  whereas some of the women appear to be keeping a lid on what they really feel, all of Wintour’s male colleagues look to be helplessly, cravenly admiring of her.)  When, a few days before the copy deadline for Vogue’s September 2007 issue, it’s decided that a last-minute reshoot is needed, you want to feel vindicated – except that it then also occurs to you that this kind of eleventh hour urgency is probably necessary to Wintour, as a means of maintaining her nervous energy levels and, once the challenge has been met, making her feel she’s gained yet another victory.  During the closing credits, there’s a final bit of interview with Wintour, when she’s asked to name her greatest strength.  ‘Decisiveness,’ she says – without, of course, a moment’s hesitation.   She reminds you of people you know who express rapidly contradictory opinions with complete certainty.  The U-turn doesn’t matter – if you’ve been unequivocal twice you’ve been doubly decisive.

Just about all I knew of Anna Wintour before seeing The September Issue was that she was the inspiration for the Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada, written by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger.  (I also knew she was the daughter of Charles Wintour, once editor of the London Evening Standard.  By coincidence, we watched The September Issue on the day of Alexander McQueen’s death.  One of those paying tribute to McQueen was Alexandra Shulman, now the editor of British Vogue, and whose father Milton was the Standard‘s theatre critic for years, including the years when Charles Wintour was its editor.)  It’s slightly odd seeing the real thing on screen three years after Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly.  The Devil Wears Prada (as a screenplay anyway) is too thin for it be worth the actress playing Miranda’s attempting to suggest a real person:  Streep’s characterisation is a brilliant distillation of the qualities associated with a tyrannical career woman.  Her ice queen Miranda is much more likeable than Anna Wintour, and not just because of the pleasure we take in Meryl Streep’s performance.   It’s the seemingly humanising characteristics of Wintour – her passing attempts at kittenishness or when she smiles or even giggles – that make her all the more alienating (and humourless).  Her phenomenal professional success doesn’t make her an inevitably fascinating personality.  After a while, it’s the discrepancy between how unremarkable she is to watch and listen to and the power she wields that becomes one of the main points of interest of The September Issue.

Another point of interest is Grace Coddington, the former cover girl who is now the creative director for US Vogue and who at one stage threatens to take over this documentary.  She talks about the passion she developed for the world of fashion, and Vogue in particular, as a convent schoolgirl in Anglesey in the 1950s.   She’s strikingly and very individually beautiful in the photographs we see of her as one of the leading models of the next decade.  In her mid-sixties (she was born in 1941), she still looks amazing – with her pale skin, mass of auburn hair and simple, usually black clothes – even if she’s unrecognisable from her younger self.  A car crash in which she sustained serious facial injuries, including damage to her left eye, led to Coddington’s starting a new career as a fashion editor.  (The development of her afterlife in the industry could be compared with the afterlives of great ballet dancers who grow into leading teachers of the next generations of dancers.)  In The September Issue, she is the only person who will stand up to Anna Wintour and the creative conflicts between them are the dramatic motor of the film.  R J Cutler – best known until now for The War Room, the documentary about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign – needs this because, although the film is meant to build as the copy deadline looms, it’s not particularly suspenseful.  (You assume throughout that the September 2007 Vogue came out OK.)    There are moments when you sense that Grace Coddington sees this film as an opportunity to express her frustrations and The September Issue is certainly structured so that her artistic choices are vindicated as emphatically as possible.  The complicity between Cutler and Coddington is sealed in the moment when, during the urgent reshoot, she has the inspiration of using the director and his camera in a photograph with a model.

There are a few glimmers of vulnerability and self-doubt when Anna Wintour talks about her family, especially when she suggests that her three siblings are ‘amused’ by her line of work.  (Her brothers are a senior figure in British local government and the political editor of The Guardian; her sister is deputy general secretary of an international public services organisation, based in Geneva .)   When she talks about her father, there’s even a suggestion of real affection – absent from the sequences in which we see Wintour with her daughter Bee (who wants to be a lawyer).  Cutler’s question about Wintour’s greatest strength during the closing credits is followed, of course, by, ‘What is your weakness?’  She clearly thinks that her answer – ‘My children’ – is clever and charming  but it may be more revealing than she intends:  you get the feeling that part of Wintour does see this kind of emotional attachment as undermining.  The little that she has to say by way of an apologia for her vocation is disappointing.  She either seems to miss the point (perhaps deliberately) of many people’s hostility to the world of fashion or is banal (I assume unintentionally).  She starts by insisting that being crazy about fashion products doesn’t mean that you’re brainless.   She elides the distinction between fashion industry professionals and readers of Vogue but whoever thinks either group is necessarily stupid anyway?  (Isn’t it more the case that fashionistas are annoying because they may well be smart and gifted – but devote themselves to what comes across as a self-absorbed and essentially shallow universe?)  Near the end of The September Issue, Wintour can’t manage anything better than ‘Fashion is never about looking back.  It’s always about looking forward’.

Still, her own foresight is clearly regarded as a major factor in the commercial success that Vogue has enjoyed under her leadership:  Grace Coddington is not the only person interviewed here who tells us that Wintour was way ahead of her time in seeing ‘the celebrity thing coming’.  Sienna Miller, who is to be the cover face of the September 2007 issue, illustrates how the fashion world generates as well makes use of celebrities:  I think more fashion magazine readers than filmgoers would be able to recognise her.  Given the way she treats most people around here, Wintour seems deferential in the presence – or even at the thought of – celebrity.  Roger Federer has appeared in Vogue and Wintour sounds like a reverent teenager when she asks Mario Testino, ‘Did you see Roger’s match yesterday?’ (I guess the 2007 Wimbledon final:  the curt, cross-sounding response – ‘No – I know he won’ – put me off Testino instantly as it made him sound like a Nadal man.)  To be fair, Wintour may be expressing awe at something greater than celebrity in Federer’s case:  it seems she is a genuine tennis fan (and player:  the last question over the closing credits is ‘What would be your greatest gift?’ and she replies, ‘A better backhand’).

Cutler interviews Wintour very gently (perhaps that was part of the deal for the film to get made).  I wish he had asked her or even one of her acolytes to explain what I can never get clear about the relationship between the artistic and commercial missions of the world of high fashion.  I don’t have a problem either with people spending their money on clothes and accessories – or with fashion designers regarding themselves as creative decorators of beautiful human faces and bodies.  What I don’t get is the boast heard in this film that one out of every ten American women will buy the Vogue September issue and the implication that they’ll do this to keep up to date with what they should be aspiring to wear – when most of the clothes are designed for the catwalk or for magazine pages but not for life outside them.   We see a fashion shoot in Rome , where the city’s architectural glories are appropriated as backgrounds to the models in Testino’s photographs.  This seems typical of the Vogue sensibility – an art based on ephemerality doing what it likes with art that was built to last.  The effrontery, like it or not, is remarkable but it would have been good to know what the Vogue supremacy felt about the artistic ethics of it.

11 February 2010