The Business of Women

Last weekend I caught an afternoon screening of The September Issue, the Anna Wintour/Vogue documentary. The movie’s producers had to have been inspired by The Devil Wears Prada, thinking that if Meryl Streep’s version made money, then they should certainly make money with the real Wintour. But The September Issue is not a Prada retread. It has no Anne Hathaway and the younger members of Vogue are seen only as background actors. This movie is about the women on top.

Certainly, the leaders of Vogue chronicled in The September Issue all dress in fashionable, expensive clothes. But they are also women in their 40s and 50s and 60s shot in unflattering lights without movie makeup. For a movie about fashion, The September Issue is about real women…and a few gay men because someone had to inspire Stanley Tucci’s character from Prada.

The problem with the The September Issue is that it lacks movie drama. Officially it’s the story of Vogue’s titular 2007 fall fashion guide that defines a season, weighs over 5 pounds, and comes in at 840 pages. But as a documentary, it fails to create a compelling arch. We see only disconnected glimpses of planning and implementation. The stakes are ill-defined and the obstacles underwhelming.

The conflict is supposed to come from Grace Coddington, who seems the inspiration for Wendie Malick’s character from Just Shoot Me—a ‘60s model turned successful fashion editor. Coddington is a quite competent creative director, though. We see her personally wrangling models on a 1920s inspired photo shoot. But the movie doesn’t explain why that particular set of photos belongs in the September issue.

Wintour’s job is to say yes or no to each photo. Doing so, Wintour is not particularly cruel or overbearing or even brilliant, just in charge. Coddington’s job is to champion her work and to be disappointed when her stuff gets cut. The movie fails to make us believe this is any more important, or any different, from every other mundane workplace disagreement.

If we don’t see the September issue, we do see daily life at a fashion magazine. It is a world where Siena Miller drops by for a fitting and then later editors debate if her photo was too “toothy”. It is days when every other word is airbrush and the most valuable employee is the guy who runs the color printer. It is people like editor-at-large André Leon Talley who plays tennis to lose weight and for an excuse to wear his tennis bracelet…I mean, tennis watch.

Ironically, The September Issue arrives when the national job average climbed to 9.8% in September. I saw this movie while waiting to hear the results of a recent job interview. I watched it expecting a mixture of jealousy and relief. The relief is that I don’t have to report to a boss from hell and I don’t have to worry about back-stabbing co-workers. The jealousy is that these people have their dream jobs while I simply dream of a job.

Coddington explains in a moment of frustration that she stays at Vogue because she cares about the art. Every person, and every organization, goes to work with two goals: 1) make money and 2) fulfill a mission. The first one usually just pays for the second, but the first can be comfortingly objective when the second seems too fleeting.

Studies have shown that receiving a new job closer to one’s skills and interests is one of the few life events that increases a person’s baseline life satisfaction. Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult to create job satisfaction outside of actual employment. But maybe we have to try. Because unemployment is reaching the point where, just like climate change, we should no longer talk about preventing it, but rather how to adapt to it.

I don’t want to speak on economic subjects too far outside my expertise, but a jobless recovery isn’t necessarily apocalyptic. I recently read that the best analogy for the Great Recession is neither the Great Depression nor Japan’s Lost Decade, but Europe in the 1980s. High unemployment and a large government imprint. But we should also remember that France has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The people working may resent higher taxes used for unemployment checks but at least they have reason to take off the pajamas in the morning.

I wish The September Issue gave us better insight into fashion’s economic model. Early on, we do see a relationship building breakfast with a department store CEO. He asks for Wintour’s help to increases designers’ shipping frequency, and Wintour kind of blows him off. I think the problem with understanding fashion has always been that even the best dressed people in real life or the powerful people on TV never wear the clothes seen on the catwalks. Maybe it’s all a trickle down effect, like that discussion of the cerulean blue sweater in The Devil Wears Prada.

The Devil Wears Prada changed my life. It convinced me to choose the life of a demanding career because I wanted the financial and non-financial rewards. With the economy the way it is, a lot of us have to find rewards elsewhere. There is danger if we fail and waste skills and ambition because there is no accompanying paycheck. There is also danger if we succeed because a generation of us may come to think of offices as movie sets, something for people on screen. I’m reminded that the most important divisions are not between men and women, or black and white or gay and straight, but between success and failure. After seeing The September Issue, that line is just as stark and just as mysterious.