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Friday, January 16, 2009

bated breath for the september issue


Two minute clip with RJ Cutler and Anna Wintour
This weekend sees the premiere screening of "The September Issue" at Sundance Film Festival. The documentary, is the outcome of eight months of filming at 4 Times Square and focuses on the production of the September issue back in 2007. (You may remember it from the cover which saw Sienna Miller with slicked back hair and superdark eyebrows.. it gathered a bit of a negative reaction at the time, If I rememeber correctly.)

For all of the Wintour bashing that makes up a good fraction of the archives on this blog, I must admit I'm very curious to see this. The frustration at the absence of inspiring editorials and the seeming lack of fashion forward content often makes me forget Anna's importance within the fashion industry. Though it may be easy to question how on earth her influence can still be relevant in an age where the likes of France Sozzani (who incidentally has edited Vogue for as long as Wintour has, and yet still manages to keep up with the mood of modern fashion and society) Carine Roitfled are steaming ahead and editing much more cutting edge international editions, they are arguably able to get away with more when they have a smaller circulation and therefore less of a reliance on the approval of advertisers. As much as we may disapprove an issue for it's unoriginal content, it must be a tricky balancing act for editor in chief, to 'people-please' both the readers, advertisers and still stay true their indiviual creative aesthetics.

I'm interested to know what Anna's reasons were for allowing the team, led by Director RJ Cutler to film for such a long period of time; in total 300 hours of footage has been produced. It seems out of character for the famously icy editor and Cutler himself claims that Vogue fashion director Grace Coddington was originally less than welcoming to towards them.

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