Status Anxiety | 12 September 2009

What’s true of Hollywood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything

As an ink-stained wretch living in New York in the Nineties, I was a little chippy about Anna Wintour. There I was, eking out a living as a general dogsbody at Vanity Fair, while she sat atop her throne as the editor of Vogue. I would often cross paths with her in the lobby of the Condé Nast building, scuttling along with my rucksack, while she glided past in her sunglasses. I was told that she didn’t like sharing the lift with anyone and if you ever found yourself standing beside her when one arrived, you were supposed to wait for the next one. I fantasised about barging past the queue of waiting sycophants, squeezing into the lift with her, and then pulling out a Big Mac. I don’t suppose she would have noticed me even then.

That was over ten years ago and watching her in The September Issue, a feature-length documentary about Vogue opening this week, I found myself warming up to her. Wintour is notoriously taciturn, presenting an icy exterior to the world, but not in this film. On the contrary, the strapline could be: ‘Garbo talks’. My guess is it’s an attempt at damage control after her unflattering portrayal in The Devil Wears Prada. It works, too, in the sense that Wintour emerges as a bit more human. This is largely thanks to the involvement of Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director. The September Issue isn’t really about Vogue, but about the relationship between these two strong-willed, middle-aged women. Unlike Wintour, Coddington is completely unguarded — she’s like the chatty wife of the CEO at the cocktail party who starts blurting out the company secrets after a couple of gin and tonics.