Everyone wants to know what exactly goes on around the 12th floor of 4 Times Square. As the trailer states, one in ten U.S. women will get Vogue's September issue — which is a fantastically broad reach for a fashion title. How the sausage is made is a question that R. J. Cutler's documentary will, one hopes, answer in full. What we can tell from the trailer is this:

Wintour's legendary editorial nit-picking is not an exaggeration. In addition to replacing stylists, trashing finished shoots (including one with Hilary Rhoda and Chanel Iman, which never saw the light of ink), pre-approving all styling choices, and demanding a full, un-edited selection of shots from the photographers Vogue works with, she nay-says fonts. "This type seems so large, and pretentious," she mutters. "It looks like it's for blind people."

The trailer also makes clear that Wintour's interventions do not always redound to her title's benefit. The camera lingers over an image from stylist Grace Coddington and photographer Steven Meisel's 1920s-themed shoot, which Coddington reports her boss killed and re-shot at least three times.

Even in grainy online video, this double-page picture — a witty take on "Déjeuner dur L'herbe", with picnicking models in pageboys and flapper dresses — looks better than what actually made it into the magazine nearly two years ago.

As for the actual September, 2007, issue, it mostly sticks out in my mind as the point at which Vogue basically ate itself. In addition to relying on model Caroline Trentini, a perennial Wintour favorite, to do three editorials, there were numerous other embarrassing juxtapositions that proved the paucity of Vogue's ideas. For instance, accidentally publishing a shot-by-shot re-make of a David Sims editorial which had been perfect-bound by the magazine only seven months before.

That's Patrick Demarchelier's September, 2007, story with Trentini, "Brights! Camera! Action!" on the left, and Sims' February, 2007, story with Gemma Ward, "Park Avenue" on the right. In case you couldn't tell them apart.

And Raquel Zimmerman appeared for a Craig McDean edit in a head-to-toe Balenciaga runway look, which was also identical to the David Sims-shot Balenciaga campaign of that season, starring Anabela Belikova.

Advertising and editorial images which are not just indistinguishable, but actually mirrors of one another — just a few pages apart.

I suppose that kind of overlap is the risk you run when all your styling decisions are taken straight off the catwalks of six months prior, and your inch-thick magazine is 87% ads, anyway. To date, the September, 2007, issue remains the biggest Vogue ever printed — a monument to pre-recession thinking, advertiser largesse, and hamstrung creativity that we may never see surpassed.

The September Issue [Yahoo! Movies]

Earlier: The September Issue Less Than Flattering?

A&E IndieFilms, in addition to bringing us documentaries like Jesus Camp and co-producing The September Issue, is owned by Hearst Entertainment and Syndication. Hearst Entertainment and Syndication, as the name might suggest, is owned by Hearst. What else is owned by Hearst? Vogue competitor Harper's Bazaar, Glamour doppelganger Marie Claire, and a raft of other direct pendants to Condé Nast media properties. It's not clear that A&E IndieFilms' ownership status meant that anyone at Hearst enjoyed editorial control or creative influence over The September Issue, it is surprising that Condé Nast would accidentally put itself in its rival's hands.

And it does fit with reports that the documentary is notably harsher on Anna Wintour than previously thought.

Fashion Week Daily acquired a copy of the documentary, which isn't to be released in the U.S. and U.K. until September 11, and posted a detailed recap of its contents on the Friday before the long U.S. Memorial Day weekend. Cutler opens with a long discourse from Wintour, defending fashion on intellectual grounds, and calling people who criticize the fashion industry frightened:

"What I often see is that people are scared of fashion — because they're frightened or insecure, so they put it down. On the whole, people who say demeaning things about our world, I think it's because they feel in some way excluded or not part of the "cool group." Just because you like to put on a beautiful Carolina Herrera dress of a pair of J Brand blue jeans instead of something basic from K-Mart doesn't mean you're a dumb person. There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous."

It's often those who themselves are most desperate to be taken seriously who are quickest to project "insecurity" onto others. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that Cutler, when he succeeds in getting Wintour to talk about her family, admits that her fellow high-achieving siblings — Patrick Wintour, political editor of the Guardian, Nora Wintour, deputy-general secretary of the Public Services International union, and James Wintour, an official with the Gravesham Borough Council who works in low-income housing — all regard her work with, she believes, "amusement."

What seems to emerge as a theme of the film, however, is Anna Wintour's relationship with Vogue stylist and former model Grace Coddington. Coddington, unhappy about the documentary team, threatened to quit the magazine and resisted Cutler's attempts to film her for months, the director recalled. (Coddington eventually relented, and Cutler's team's presence at one of her shoots led to a charming picture of Caroline Trentini and a cameraman, jumping together for an editorial.)

Wintour says that the cameraman's stomach needs retouching. "You need to go to the gym!" she says, not remotely in jest. (This is the woman who ordered Oprah to drop 20 lbs before shooting her for the cover, and who bullied André Leon Talley into taking up tennis, a sport he is filmed pursuing while decked out in Damon Dash pants, a Polo Ralph Lauren shirt, a vintage diamond Piaget watch, a Louis Vuitton towel, a Louis Vuitton racquet cover, and a Louis Vuitton gym bag.) Coddington rejects Wintour's criticism of the cameraman's body — "Everybody isn't perfect in this world. It's enough that the models are perfect. You don't need to go to the gym" — but she waits for her boss to leave the room before airing her disagreement.

The film also apparently gives an unprecedentedly detailed look at Wintour's managerial style and her level of involvement with the magazine. Wintour retains absolute creative control over every editorial shot. She does not shy from killing spreads by talented and proven long-time collaborators, such as Edward Enninful (Coddington's story with Trentini is a re-shoot of an Enninful effort) and Coddington herself. "I'm in a really foul mood right now because they've just killed another spread of my '20s story, and they're about to kill another one," says Coddington, at one point. "And they're all lying to me about it. It's just incredibly boring."

She also kills a spread with models Hilary Rhoda and Chanel Iman, jumping. (This was during Vogue's long, just-ended drought of faces of color on its editorial pages — it's interesting to note that Iman, who is black, was even in the running for inclusion in American Vogue in September 2007.)

It's no wonder, really, that her publication's creativity so often ends up channeled into the inevitable jumping editorial, the inevitable lavish-but-boring set piece. Wintour's nit-picking leaves even the talented eyes and minds around her too hamstrung to function.

If the full film is as critical as FWD maintains, then that means Anna Wintour has made one move worthy of respect: allowing Cutler to film her, no-holds-barred. But will Condé Nast be pleased at the results?

The September Issue, Revealed! [FWD]
More Details from The September Issue Vogue Documentary Featuring Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington [Fashionologie]
Hearst Takes On Condé [FWD]
Film reveals soft side to Vogue's icy style queen Anna Wintour [Guardian]

Earlier:
Vogue Documentary Is Delicious & Devil-ish

For some reason, Caroline Trentini has practically never within living memory been permitted to keep both feet on the ground in an American Vogue editorial. Anna Wintour’s favorite springy Brazilian, seemingly without regard for osteoarthritis or patellar tendonitis, casts herself nobly aloft in every season, in every setting, and in every conceivable kind of pump, flat, sandal, mule, platform, and T-strap. Sometimes in the past she's had partners in airborne crime like Elise Crombez (whatever happened to her? Did she age out of the industry at a ripe old 26?) but most often it's Carol, alone, doing what apparently comes naturally. In case you've forgotten her crucial gravity-defying role in Vogues past, they even run a June 2008 photo of her midflight in crampons and 24k gold fur on a Patagonian glacier on page 544:



So. Surprise! There's a jumping editorial in this issue. But! This time, instead of heading into mid air to sell sheath dresses to office workers (in some makebelieve world where office workers can afford Lanvin), Caroline jumps for a reason. Kind of. It took a while (in fact it took so long I'm half sure the jumping overlapped with a ready made narrative completely by accident) but Vogue finally found a story where Caroline leaping in frocks makes sense — because she's posing with the three kids who'll take turns playing Billy Elliot when it opens on Broadway October 1. Dancers! Dancers jump!


And the results are beautiful.
Seriously, the editorial is kind of breathtaking.




And then the magazine goes and ruins all the uncharacteristic pro-Vogue mojo it dredged up with that heavenly dozen pages by painting the distinctively freckled and pale Trentini the color of burnt Cheetos and giving her a vicious bikini wax so she can wear a swimsuit that makes my vulva scream and reach for the smelling salts. Oh well! The aesthetic contact high was nice while it lasted.


September Vogue to me signifies a worrisome rubicon in the gerrymandering of the definition of "model" to include any two-bit celebrity with a film or an album or a divorce to promote. (I have nothing against actors and I think Keira Knightley is a fine practitioner of her particular craft. But I don't try to do her job and I ask the same courtesy in return.) Ordinarily the actress — supposedly a ringer to drum up readership, although that paradigm appears increasingly flawed — gets the cover because she is profiled inside; the "fashion spread" accompanying the inevitable puff piece is just a bit of lifestyle-y, cult-of-celebrity-reflecting extra bang for your buck. But in this issue, there is no profile. Keira Knightley has 18 pages of this magazine to herself to illustrate a paragraph about Berlin and "the current generation of intriguing, intelligent provocateurs working there." Keira Knightley isn't an actress posing for showy portraits to illustrate, however obliquely, her own press: She's treated here like any old pretty face attached to a random (no, really random: Knightley admits she had never even been to Berlin until the shoot) concept — and a wardrobe of this season's clothes. She is, in these pages, presented more as model than actress.
So it is my judgment of her as a model and nothing less when I say she looks, on almost every page, perfectly awful. She doesn't know what to do with her hands. She doesn't know what to do with her face. She doesn't know what to do with her mouth, so in picture after picture, she lets it fall limply open. She doesn't know whether to mug for the camera or grasp for some idea of high-fashion gravitas; she sort of does both and she sort of does neither and it all comes off badly more often than not. In this jailhouse dress photo she's actually grimacing.


As one commentator noted, a propensity for holding your lips pursed and half-open makes it look like you're always blowing on an invisible bowl of soup.


Keira Knightley has more of a neck in that sketch likeness she's holding up than she does in most of this edit. One of the reasons why non-models just aren't as good at showing fashion to its best effect as models are is because they don't have the practiced photographic subject's knack for guessing how the human body will read in two dimensions from a given angle — so here I am worrying why this beautiful woman doesn't appear to have a neck, instead of thinking about either of those potentially interesting dresses.


This is her best shot and it's pretty fantastic. But is it worth the 17 other hammy, overacted, more or less off-looking lavishly produced editorial pictures full of light and color and signifying nothing? I say no.


Because, seriously, what kind of a culture are we living in that when Anna Wintour tells an Academy Award-nominated actress to tie a trash bag on her head because some art world folks are dossing in Berlin (apparently for such deep and meaningful reasons as the fact that in New York you can't smoke anywhere anymore), the Academy Award-nominated actress automatically does it? I tell you who ties trash bags on their heads because Ms. Wintour says so: Models. And we submit to the vagaries of fashion editor whims good naturedly, because it's an honest living and better than many, and because we certainly aren't inclined or empowered to question a shoot's direction like, say, a respected actress would (or should) be. And we do it because we don't have the comforts that being Hollywood's second-highest paid actress confers. Keira Knightley, you may be beautiful, but more importantly, you have at least some measure of talent; you ought to be sharing that with the world. Don't just model, because done barely adequately it's bullshit, trust me.


Now. Back to sublime: It's Sasha time.


Sasha Pivovarova is a goddess. The lithe Russian elf (who, as a part-time artist, would've been a much better fit for that Berlin story than Knightley) is nevertheless the perfect foil for McQueen's clothes, which can skate close to excessively baroque territory. She wears these dainty little embellished slippers in every shot and it makes for a really nice change from the ubiquitous 4 lb heavy, 7" tall editorial platforms.


I don't dig the waxed-candyfloss hair and I know it must have been painful to achieve. But, I think, thoroughly worth it.


For future reference, Anna Wintour: This is your cover shot.

• Ooh, intrigue!! The anonymous fashion (er, accessories?) editor behind View From The Fourth Row may be unceremoniously unmasked. Like, soon. [Fashionista]
• Penelope Cruz is the latest starlet to start a second career as a guest-fashion designer; she and her sister Monica will be designing frocks for Spanish retailer Mango. [WWD]
• The Gap continues to try to claw its way back to relevance: it's hired Doo-Ri Chung, Thakoon Panichgul and Kate and Laura Mulleavy to create a limited-edition collection of white shirts. [WWD]
• Norma Kamali is on a mission to promote... olive oil. [WWD]

• A dedicated website with a delicious preview of Kate Moss collection for TopShop. [KateMossTopShop]
• If you need a TopShop fix right now, however, try this adorable orange-striped, woolen pinafore dress. [TopShop]