Print

Mail

wiki links

FILM REVIEW: Strike a pose

By Ian Bartholomew
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Sep 25, 2009, Page 16

FILM NOTES THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE DIRECTED BY: R.J. CUTLER STARRING: ANNA WINTOUR AND THE STAFF OF ‘VOGUE’ RUNNING TIME: 90 MINUTES TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY

VIEW THIS PAGE

The September Issue, a documentary that takes the camera into the boardrooms, backrooms and catwalks of high fashion lifts the delightful veil that was The Devil Wears Prada to take an all-too-brief look at the reality that lies behind the publishing empire that is Vogue magazine.

The film puts Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue and a woman who is regularly referred to as the most powerful person in the fashion industry, front and center. The period it covers is the run up to the launch of the 2007 September issue of Vogue, which was to be the thickest yet, and possibly, at just under 900 pages, the heaviest magazine ever published.

The improbable characters who take part in this endeavor put fiction to shame. One of the most lively is Andre Leon Talley, Vogue’s editor-at-large, a massive man whose collection of furs, caftans and complete Louis Vuitton tennis outfit with accessories, as well as his grand pronouncements about beauty, produce comedy of the first order. There is Wintour herself, on whom Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada is based. And at the other end is the soft-spoken young designer Thakoon Panichful, who is making his way up the fashion ladder and who is casually given a lift by Wintour, something she achieves with a few words of understated recommendation to other movers and shakers of the fashion world.

Although Wintour is the focus of the film, she does not say much to the camera and remains elusive throughout. Her comments about fashion and what it represents are interesting, but it is what other people say about her that is memorable.

An aide to Wintour, talking to the camera, tells us that Wintour “is just not very accessible to people she doesn’t need to be accessible to.” Junior editors look mortified and bewildered when their work is dismissed with a couple of words, unable to get a word in before Wintour has turned her attention to something else. To balance this out, one of Wintour’s daughters makes a brief appearance to suggest that she for one doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about fashion. The young lady would rather study law, to the visible disappointment of her mother.

One of the most expressive characters in the documentary is Grace Coddington, a former model and now a senior design editor who is one of the very few people in the film unafraid to stand her ground against Wintour. The emotional heart of the documentary is the relationship between the two women, which largely plays out as each woman, separately, views the layouts as the magazine takes shape.

Highly articulate and frank, Coddington in many ways is constantly in danger of taking over as the center of attention, but Cutler never lets us forget Wintour’s presence, an immovable object against which everyone else, even Coddington, is pushing against.

The beauty of The September Issue is not that it lays bare the secrets behind the fashionable facade of the fashion industry. Cutler is good-natured about the absurdity of fashion, prepared to laugh at it, but also willing to accept this multi-billion US dollar industry as a big part of our world. Although he never really cracks Wintour’s sphinx-like inscrutability, he has produced a film that had fashion journalists chortling out loud during a press screening and also provided fascinating glimpses behind the scenes for those without the slightest interest in clothes, much less that exotic niche that is haute couture. It does this by telling us a little more about the fashion world than we could glean from The Devil Wears Prada, and suggests that it is both a much more human and at the same time a much weirder place than we imagined.

VIEW THIS PAGE