Initially, The September Issue comes off as something like the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.
As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.
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A film about the world’s greatest living couturier would have to work overtime in order to not be beautiful, but Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor manages to find a certain poetics behind the eye candy. Where Unzipped––to my mind the last great fashion documentary––was heavily invested in a kind of designer-as-tortured artist schematics that inevitably could only resolve themselves, competition doc-style, in a final runway show, Valentino is both a more surface-oriented portrait of a man and a deeper examination of the changing politics of the luxury industry.
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