While everyone is compiling their year-end (and decade-end) best-of lists, I thought it might be a good idea to take another look at this piece. While The September Issue wasn’t the best movie I saw this year, it was certainly one of the most though-provoking, especially as a member of the print media.
Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.
So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH, I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.
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Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.
Once I began working for a beauty magazine, I had to pick it up again—along with every other major woman’s book—as part of my job. I’d flip through the new issues each month, looking for mentions of our advertisers (naturally) and new trends in cosmetics. Doing so over and over for several years gave me an impression of each title’s aim and focus…and I wasn’t surprised to see that Vogue hadn’t changed much in the dozen or so years since I’d last picked it up. Some of the images were gorgeous, of course, but many—with bland, neutral backgrounds – seemed repetitious from issue to issue. The stories on Botox and thousand-dollar clothes reeked of privilege, and it was still a gossip sheet writ large for the Upper East Side.
So naturally, I was curious to see The September Issue, a documentary about the fashion bible shot while the staff pieced together its fall fashion edition in 2007. Now that I oversee photo shoots and judge layouts of my own, I wanted to witness how they did all of that inside the vaunted Condé Nast hallways. I had to determine whether Andre Leon Talley is as ridiculous in person as his headshot and columns make him appear. And of course, Meryl Streep needed a reality check—was the real Anna Wintour actually as heartless and cunning in her disapproval?
After an afternoon at the movie theater, I learned that the answer is no—at least to the latter. While opinionated and swift in her decision-making, she was never cruel to her employees. In several scenes in her own office—which did bear a striking resemblance to the set of The Devil Wears Prada—Wintour sorted through photo options from various designers and made snap decisions about which ones would go and which would stay. Some editors would offer a half-hearted defense for a look they particularly liked, but their protests quickly faded under Wintour’s judgmental glare. She’d smile tightly, and kid around with staffers, but she never seemed to be overtly mean. (Of course, she could have been playing up her softer side for the cameras, but who knows?) Despite mentions of her icy persona in the documentary itself, I still didn’t buy it; too often, women in leadership positions who act decisively and without an overly fuzzy personality get a bum rap when men at similar levels behave the same way and no one bats a perfectly curled eyelash.
No, Anna Wintour’s problem is not that she’s unfriendly—it’s that she has no vision. There’s a certain irony in watching The September Issue now, more than two years after its footage was shot…and probably 18 months or so since print journalism’s gradual slide downward began its current sharp spiral. The scene in the documentary where Vogue’s advertising staff crows about the 644 pages of advertising they sold for the September 2007 issue—enough to qualify as the magazine’s largest ever—is a bit sad knowing that the subsequent two fall fashion-focused editions have been mere shadows of that high mark. Wintour was also able to place spread after spread throughout the issue, seemingly without having to carve any of them up to fit ads or drop any due to space issues. (Many of the spreads are of gorgeous images planned and styled by Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director and the one staffer who dares to push back at Wintour.)
This lack of vision is relevant because the documentary makes such a point of showing how influential Wintour is in the fashion industry—a point with which I doubt many would disagree. She holds private audiences with designers for previews of their collections, and she hand-picked the wunderkind Thakoon for a Vogue partnership with The Gap, propelling him toward his career in couture. As for the magazine, her main contribution is underscored as turning its focus toward celebrity culture, especially by putting famous females on the cover. (Indeed, the cover girl in September 2007 was the starlet Sienna Miller.)
But that change is one that took place in the 1990s, and something I now see lambasted in various corners as the new millennium brought on a constant rotation of starlets such as Miller, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johanssen. Over the last two years, as all magazines (especially those pushing high fashion) have taken a nosedive, Vogue has gone retro with covers featuring supermodels such as Linda Evangelista—the very thing that Wintour was lauded for reversing. Did that move bring greater financial success to Vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s? Apparently so, given the company line from Condé Nast as it’s stated in the film. As my movie-going companion pointed out, focusing on celebrities may have helped Vogue make a bigger penetration in Middle American markets that don’t necessarily follow high fashion—but given the magazine’s remaining insistence on following the New York social scene (which still alienates this blue state native), I’m not so sure that helped retain that audience.
Other than that decade-old accomplishment, what does Wintour bring to the pages of Vogue? After years of following the magazine and 90 minutes in a movie theater, I don’t know. Yes, she’s a strong leader who seems to know exactly what she wants, and quickly—but in all of those scenes where she made snap judgments, she gave no reasons behind her decision. Or, more accurately, none other than “This doesn’t seem necessary” or “There’s too much black.” While creative editing on the documentarians’ part may have a hand in this depiction, she seems like nothing more than a dictator whose word stands based on a stale military victory. Late in the film, she decides to nix the results of a photo shoot on color blocking that Coddington oversaw and order a reshoot—with apparently no new direction given. (Wintour felt free to cut multiple pages of many of Coddington’s shoots; after removing a number of spreads from an ethereal ‘20s shoot, Coddington remarked that Wintour had just put the kibosh on about $50,000 worth of work. It’s hard to believe such waste would fly in today’s magazine market.) The previous color block shoot had been shot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with bright hues all around; the reworked version appeared to have been completed in a Long Island studio with a neutral background—just like any number of Vogue spreads over the past few years.
It’s not a stretch to say that Coddington may have more artistic vision than Wintour does. The film quotes one Vogue staffer as saying that there’s no one else who can style shoot and produce beautiful photography in the same way that Coddington does—perhaps a testament to the time she spent as a model in London in her youth. It could even be argued that the film makes an argument that Coddington is best qualified to lead Vogue, perhaps while leaving Wintour a place to continue influencing fashion. Coddington cut an imposing figure in the film as she stood looking out over a regal French garden, her mass of kinky red hair flowing in the wind, before overseeing a shoot on the latest haute couture. While standing there, she lamented that her vision of a more romantic world in Vogue had dated her, while the currents of fashion (heralded by Wintour) passed her by.
But after seeing the striking work she produced for the September 2007 issue—both published and unpublished—it’s painful to think of what she may have had to sacrifice in her concepts and vision to suit smaller magazine sizes since then.
And this is where Wintour falls flat. She had one idea—the embrace of celebrity culture—that once brought Vogue great success and didn’t sustain the brand after the bottom fell out. And what’s happened since then? Competitor Elle won the race between beauty and fashion books for the September issue this year, scoring more advertising pages than Vogue. It might be prudent to do a comparison between the ads in the two magazines, to determine which advertisers Elle reeled in that Vogue did not. I highly doubt they brought in more high-end labels and retailers, so maybe the idea should be to aim a little lower, toward the affordable fashion that real people need these days.
But as Coddington illuminated in the film’s last plot point, those folks are hardly seen in Vogue anymore. She and photographer Patrick DeMarchelier enlisted the help of one of the documentary’s cameramen to appear in a shot for the color block shoot, which was then Photoshopped to appear as though a model were in the same frame. Wintour made a comment that her staff would also need to Photoshop out the cameraman’s slight belly paunch, an order that Coddington quickly reversed.
It’s a new world for print media, and The September Issue is a time capsule of how it used to be. So far, though, this new world still includes Wintour and her vague, old-school ideas of what works. But in order for Vogue to survive, it’s going to realize that it needs to change course as well.
