September issue
Does anyone remember The Devil Wears Prada?
It was the movie adaptation of the novel about life at a New York fashion magazine, in which Meryl Streep played the despotic editor who reduced her staff to jelly, tears and occasionally, nervous breakdowns.
Written by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger, everybody thought it was based on her old boss, who has been at the helm of the magazine since 1988. But nobody really believed that it was a true depiction of her.
The result is The September Issue, a riveting and brilliant film that makes The Devil Wears Prada look like an episode of The Care Bears.
Editor-in-chief of Vogue for two decades, Ana Wintour has earned a reputation for being the most feared woman in the fashion industry and in this documentary from R.J. Cutler, we can see why.
Shot over the course of assembling the 2007 September issue ” the benchmark of fashion ” we’re given a glimpse behind the scenes at the magazine, where Ana Wintour pulls the different elements together with the help of her many invisible minions.
There’s only one woman who doesn’t shrink in her shadow, and that’s her friend Grace Coddington, another former model who climbed the ranks alongside the more forceful, and far more ambitious Ana Wintour.
I met Ana Wintour one time just before the William Rast/Justin Timberlake show. I wanted to interview her to see if she was thinking that the recession had an impact on the designers’ creativity. My sentence was so long that she looked at me with a little smile and she said : “humm let me think about it and I will get back to you at the end of the show “.
I was seated next to her daughter during the show and apologized to Ana for my endless sentence! I didn’t see her eyes behind her black sunglasses but she seemed to appreciate it. Knowing who she was and her reputation, I was impressed by her and got caught off guard ! We ended up not getting her interview but the next time Juliette Longuet won’t let the chance pass by .
