Readers and moviegoers ate up Wintour’s literary doppelgänger, which bodes well for the commercial prospects of The September Issue, a fascinating, frustrating documentary about the real Wintour and the making of the War And Peace-sized September issue of Vogue. The larger-than-life fashionistas documented here immerse themselves in a task roughly as important and labor-intensive as planning D-Day, putting together an issue that will set the tone and establish the trends for the entire fashion year.
Prada readers might wonder why a figure as legendarily image-conscious and remote as Wintour might open herself up to the scrutiny of a documentary, but the fashion/publishing icon makes it through September with her privacy and secrets intact. Director R.J. Cutler maintains a respectful distance from Wintour and similarly compelling subjects, like model turned Vogue creative director Grace Coddington and towering, iconic editor-at-large André Leon Talley. Cutler is in the enviable position of having arguably too many fascinating documentary subjects, but while September is never boring, it’s also superficial. The internal machinations of Vogue might be too much for a single documentary to handle; a multi-part TV documentary series might have given the folks behind the camera more time and space to flesh out these colorful characters and let audiences decide for themselves whether they love or hate Wintour, or fall somewhere in between.
