Documentary: The September Issue

This documentary follows the work process of the Editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour, in creating the 2007 September issue.

The documentary focuses on how powerful Anna is in terms of influencing fashion designers and other who work with her such as the creative director of Vogue – Grace Coddington. In this documentary, you can have an idea of how an issue of a fashion magazine is created from initial ideas to the final product. We also see that the designers really respect the editor’s opinions and they would bring in different sketches for Anna to approve on before they actually go on and start working on the collection. So we often see this conflict between the designer and the editor when they do not agree with each other. This demonstrates that the designer’s freedom is limited. A designer cannot just do what he wants to do but he has to listen to different opinions and try to satisfy the needs of the clients and those who will publish your work.

This film also focuses on the relationship between the editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and the creative director Grace Coddington. Both of them have worked for Vogue for a long time and they seem to be in conflict with each other a lot of the times. Sometimes the creative director will have an idea or a photo shoot that she is very excited about but gets “killed” but Anna. In this film, the creative director is portrayed as more of an artist who is really passionate about the work she is doing. There is one line that I remember most clearly. Grace talked about when she started her career, a photographer she worked with taught her to “always keep your eyes open.” She said that no matter where she goes, she never sleeps in the car and just keeps watching everything she sees out of the window and they are all great inspiration. This is the same with design. We just need to pay attention to everything we see around us and they can all become great inspirations.

Vogue is the first magazine that started to put celebrities on the cover and became really successful because of it. It also influenced other publications that followed the trend. There is a conversation that the creative director is talking about how she hates to put celebrities on the cover but she knows that Anna is doing the right thing with the celebrity culture because the magazines will sell because of it. So we can see this clash between art and commerce, and most of the times art will have to sacrifice for commercial purposes because without the money, art could not survive.

In this documentary, we also see that the editor-in-chief is very meticulous about every detail in the magazine. The designers will bring copies of different versions of the cover for her to comment on and approve on. And she often will make very detailed suggestions such as the retouching of the photographs, type treatment and use of color. We can also see the process of the editors get together and determine the order of the pages for the issue. For example, they will put pages that have bright colors and dramatic photographs at the beginning of the magazine because they catch reader’s attention and are good to “open” the magazine.