The September Issue

The movie focuses, rather shrewdly, on the production of a single issue, from September 2007, which its editor, Anna Wintour, announces will be the biggest (and most hernia-inducing) ever. What the movie unfolds is how the magazine is inextricable from Wintour’s vision of it.

Rather than merely compose a series of heads talking about why Wintour is the pope of fashion, as one staffer basically says, Cutler shows the pope at work. Making a house call to Oscar de la Renta, who shows a couple of gorgeous gowns, and to Stefano Pilati, at Yves St. Laurent, whose collection seems to bore her. Wintour tells Pilati what she thinks, and the designer’s slightly embarrassed response speaks volumes about how the rest of us can’t handle an honest assessment of our work without taking it personally, either. Taste is personal.

And sometimes Wintour is wrong, especially when it comes to the sensibility of Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director. Coddington is Wintour’s opposite. They’re about the same age and from the U.K., but Coddington is frumpy where Wintour is sleek (granted she’s as glamorous a frump as one can hope to be); reflective where Wintour is reactive; nurturing where Wintour can be steely. Coddington wears her orange hair in a wild frizz. Wintour favors that iconic pageboy. An automobile accident ended Coddington’s modeling career in the 1960s and has left her with a limp, and I’m assuming it takes an amazing amount of gumption to thrive in fashion with that particular accessory. She and Wintour have worked together for 20 years. But they took glaringly different paths to the top. Coddington toiled her way there. Wintour tells us, with a hint of embarrassment, she was essentially installed.