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. In one memorable scene, she lets slip what I’ve long suspected about successful Englishwomen in fashion: ‘I’m making it up as I go along — whoops!’
That ‘whoops’ is intended ironically. Coddington, being the less powerful of the two, doesn’t have as much invested in maintaining the illusion of omniscience. Indeed, there are many aspects of running the world’s most glamorous magazine that she doesn’t give a fig about. In a line guaranteed to endear her to almost everyone watching, she says, ‘I wouldn’t really care if I never saw another celebrity.’ She recognises that putting celebrities on the cover is essential if Vogue is to maintain its market share, but she loathes being beholden to them — and quite right, too. After I interviewed Claudia Schiffer for a Tatler cover story back in the Nineties, the German supermodel told me she’d been granted copy approval over the piece I was doing. I refused to write it.
Throughout the film we see Wintour making snap decisions: this dress, not that one, this photo, not that one. She has a whim of iron, which is a constant trial for her staff. Again and again, we see Coddington struggling to contain herself as her capricious mistress gives the thumbs down to something she’s been working on for months. It was horribly reminiscent of my own experiences in the glossy magazine business. I remember going to a screening of Jerry Maguire one afternoon with a colleague and exchanging eye contact with him when Tom Cruise describes the agenting business as ‘a pride-swallowing siege’. My friend and I walked back to Vanity Fair’s offices screaming ‘a pride-swallowing siege’ at the top of our voices.
Yet Wintour could not behave in a less authoritarian way without jeopardising her status. What’s true of Hollywood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything. How could they? There isn’t really such a thing as ‘the Zeitgeist’ that Wintour has a hotline to. In the expression ‘where it’s at’, the word ‘it’ doesn’t stand for anything. In this sea of uncertainty, it is those who can pronounce on the vicissitudes of fashion with the most authority that end up calling the shots. Wintour excels because she has that patrician, ruling-class manner that Americans find so intimidating. When she speaks, it is with the bottomless self-confidence of someone born to rule — and knowing your own mind and brooking no opposition is essential to maintaining this mystique. When asked by the director of the film what her chief strength is, Wintour replies, ‘Decisiveness.’ There’s no hesitation, either. But when asked what her main weakness is there’s a very long pause. I suspect it is her willingness to tolerate Grace Coddington’s dissent, and for that she deserves a good deal of credit.
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