You wait ages for a fashion documentary and then two come along. Valentino: The Last Emperor came out in 2008 and the following year The September Issue; both cracking good films.
Reluctantly, I am grateful for the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, as it surely inspired them. The September Issue tells the story of the making of the September 2007 issue of American Vogue. Editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, presides frigidly and it is left to her side-kick Grace Coddington to provide warmth and humour. It is not for nothing that Ms Wintour has earned the sobriquet Nuclear. Concealed behind dark glasses she sedulously ignores the camera crew and is pretty sharp with her staff. Poor Mario Testino gets a good bollocking for not taking enough pictures on a photo-shoot in Rome with Sienna Miller. I suppose it was an expensive jaunt and the shareholders might have expected a few more happy snaps. Here is an example of Grace Coddington’s work.
Valentino is similarly diverting. His Irish major-domo is a natural and there was a subsequent short film in which he stars. I have the DVD and re-watch. But now I have something new, a BBC documentary Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue. The UK Vogue editor-in-chief is Alexandra Schulman – only a few degrees warmer than Anna Wintour – and her side-kick Lucinda Chambers. The chemistry is the same as in the American office, even Mario Testino pops up again.
What interests me about these two titans of fashion, Wintour and Schulman, is they are both British and their fathers were successful journalists. Anna’s dad Charles edited The Evening Standard and more: Alexandra’s papa Milton was a theatre critic also for the ES among others. Their fathers are from the old school of journalism, as exemplified by Man in Taxi; lunch was of no fixed duration, expense accounts were there to be spent. Their daughters show a shocking professionalism.
Warning: this video may contain pugs.
You are of course spot-on. High fashion and its leaders are very interesting. I think it’s the collision between the seriousness of these people as they produce the utterly trivial. Or is it the other way round? Clothes can indeed be breathtaking, and many of their greatest creators and promoters seem like industrious goblins in a fairy-story.
And it is of course hilarious that the fashion gurus are so bossy. Dictatorial, even. Not for nothing are they styled, “Fashionista”. It is beyond parody that Fendi have restored and moved into Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a famous Mussolini building in Rome. (I am inclined to admire its Brutalism, mind.)
We have indeed been well-served with fashion documentaries. You don’t mention, so I will, the DVD series on the Chanel couture process. Google (or as I prefer to say, Duck-Duck-Go) “Signé Chanel” for more. It’s a curious mixture of the very modern and the sort of world which lurks in Paul Gallico’s “Flowers For Mrs Harris” (“Mrs ‘Ariss Goes to Paris” in the US).
Not precisely on-point, but the same sort of aesthetic draws one to the “Bill Cunningham, New York” DVD, about the (late) fashion street photographer, famous not least for his excellent taste (shared by Monty Don) for French labourers’ cotton jackets in blue.