The September Issue

Overview

It’s been said that the British royal family’s descent into irrelevance began in the late 1960s, when they agreed to be involved in a television documentary cunningly titled Royal Family. Anna Wintour, Queen of Fashion, had better hope The September Issue doesn’t sound out a similar death knell for her.

This film offers us commoners a fly-on-the-wall view of the creative processes behind one of the great tomes of the fashion world, US Vogue. Director RJ Cutler’s cameras tail Wintour, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, as she and her staff prepare the September 2008 issue of the magazine â€" and the result is everything you expect. Celebrities are openly ridiculed, sumptuous clothes are flicked carelessly about, and in one brilliant, couldn’t-script-it-better-if-you-tried moment, an impossibly flamboyant Andre Leon Talley (the editor-at-large) intones deadpan his need to preserve his “aesthetic” on the courts, whilst proudly showing off his collection of Louis Vuitton tennis gear. If it all feels a little familiar, it probably is: the film plays out like a (better) sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, a film whose depiction of a despotic fictional fashion editor was widely rumoured to be modelled on Wintour.

Dashes of humour and slick editing combine to make The September Issue an immensely watchable film â€" as long as that’s all you’re after. Punters hoping for any semblance of profundity may be partly mollified by telling interviews with Wintour, in which she muses that her successful siblings probably find her job amusing (one brother, for instance, is political editor of highbrow British rag The Guardian). And Wintour’s right-hand woman Grace Coddington, as one of the few Vogue-rs willing to tell her ‘no’, is a welcome slap of reality.

Ultimately, if you’re the kind of person who believes the fashion industry is wasteful, that its gatekeepers are over the top, and that it consumes the minds and attention of thousands of bright sparks whose efforts might be better directed towards curing cancer or creating the perfect souffléâ€" well, The September Issue is not going to change your mind. But much like Vogue itself, it does offer a pleasant enough distraction.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xp8iIyKDOtk