| |
| |
![]() |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
NEW YORK - When models parade at New York's Fashion Week starting this Thursday, many eyes will turn from the runway to a slender figure alongside: American Vogue's empress Anna Wintour.
Wintour, who turns 60 in November, is described by many as the single most powerful person in the global fashion industry.
Yet the Anglo-American editor, famous for her pageboy haircut and big dark glasses, is as much an enigma as she is famous, and a new documentary, "The September Issue," is adding to her mystique.
Many thought they knew her thanks to a popular film reportedly based on her rule at Vogue, "The Devil Wears Prada."
In the movie, Meryl Streep plays the tyrannical editor of a fictional magazine Runway.
No one doubted that the demanding figure was based Wintour. After all, the film is based on a novel written by one of Wintour's former assistants, Lauren Weisberger.
But "The September Issue" is helping to humanize the ice queen, revealing a no less ambitious, but certainly warmer character.
A film crew directed by R.J. Cutler spent eight months inside Vogue as the magazine's thickest issue in history, September 2007, gradually took shape.
The documentary not only offers a rare inside view of Wintour's life, but accidentally came to record the high water mark of the economy ahead of last year's deep recession.
In an issue 840 pages thick, no less than 727 are given to advertising -- a world away from the financial turmoil facing both the publishing industry and many in fashion. The latest Vogue, for example, has about 300 pages fewer in advertising.
What has not changed, for now, is Wintour's place at the top of the heap.
"The September Issue" illustrates vividly her power in the long chain that runs from designers to manufacturers and stores to clothes-buying women.
One scene shows her meeting with the head of upscale clothing store chain Neiman Marcus who asks her what designers she plans to support. He needs to know so that he can then give clothes from those designers prominent displays in his shops.
As the CEO says, "nobody was wearing fur until Anna put it back on the cover."
Vogue's cover is especially closely watched.
Part of the reason for that is Wintour's innovation, started after she took over two decades ago, in putting celebrities, not just models, on the cover -- a break with tradition that proved a money spinner.
She also has strict control over what goes inside, sometimes axing work without discussion.
As Vogue publisher Tom Florio says in the documentary: "It's always going to be Anna's point of view".
Wintour says in the documentary that she seemed destined for Vogue ever since growing up in London in the 1960s, when her father Charles Wintour was a renowned newspaper editor.
"I think my father decided for me. And this was it," she said.
Her daughter Katherine "Bee" Shaffer, has also made her decision.
"I respect her, but it's a weird industry for me. It's amusing but there are other things out there. I'd rather go to law school," she says. - AFP/ar
|
