When the documentary Unzipped came out, I had to scour the small town I grew up in to find a copy. It was 1995 and still a few years before words like YouTube, NetFlix, and amazon.com would become a part of popular vernacular. The Douglas Keeve-directed film, which follows designer Isaac Mizrahi through the process of creating a fashion collection, was my first real look inside the fashion industry. It provides a witty peek into the life Mizrahi while he searches for muses, refines fabrics, and fits models. Unzipped removed the veil on the fashion industry and what it really takes to create a beautiful collection—even if it was, as one critic at the time put it, “a line of Eskimo fashion knock-offs.”

Unzipped pretty much stood alone in the fashion documentary category (unless you include mocumentary, Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?) until Seamless, Douglas Keeve's 2005 documentary that followed a handful of up-and-coming fashion designers as they compete for the CFDA awards. And while there have been documentaries on a handful of other individual designers, including last year’s Valentino-The Last Emperor, there had yet to be a documentary that took viewers inside a magazine (The Devil Wears Prada, does not count).

Thank you R. J. Cutler, and thank you Anna Wintour and everyone at Vogue for finally allowing that to happen. The September Issue, hits theaters nationwide on September 11, is a raw and witty look at the most important player in the 3 billion dollar fashion industry—Anna Wintour.

From convincing Miuccia Prada to change the fabrication of her coats so that retailers, including Neiman Marcus, will have an easier time selling them, to brokering deals between new designers like Thakoon Panichgul and mass retailer The Gap, to helping designers edit their collections, the biggest takeaway from the film is that Wintour is the biggest and most important influence on every stitch in the industry.

And yes, Wintour slashes pages, demeans designer's visions, and sends assistants scurrying with the icy glares and abrupt speech that makes her oft used handle, Nuclear Wintour, seem nice. But let us put the lack of warmth aside (as it doesn't matter in the slightest).

Much of the film focuses on the tension between Wintour and flame-haired creative director, Grace Coddington. Like a truly great editor-creator relationship, Grace brings the ideas and Anna makes sure that they don’t get too big or over-the-top. While at times, Wintour’s page cuts and decisions on clothing that should or shouldn’t make it into Vogue’s pages might seem knee-jerk, it is Wintour’s confidence and decisiveness that makes Vogue a well-rounded fashion book.

Coddington's imagery is hands-down the most expressive, most beautiful, and most thought-out in the industry, but without Wintour, the magazine would all be fairy tale, with no take home lessons on fit and fabrics and trend. Of all the great stylists out there—Polly Mellon, Joe Zee, Alex White, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Camilla Nickerson, and Carine Roitefeld—no one even comes close to creating a story like Grace. Not only does she compose lovely pictures, she also makes sure that the clothes are put front-and-center, and manages to create complex looks that never appear obnoxiously overstyled. The vision is all hers—obviously with some major help from prop and photo stylists, photographers, and a slew of assistants—but Anna plays an important role too. 

I went back after the viewing on Friday and looked through my September 2007 issue. There is a much-disputed editorial spread on 1920s Parisian fashion that is filled with flapper gowns, cloche hats, shadowy silks, and exquisite furs, and that Wintour ruthlessly slashed a number of pages from. In its final form, the package ran at 16 pages. Much like a writer who turns in a 7,000-word story when the assignment asked for merely 3,000, Coddington’s creativity knows no bounds. She could conceive and produce enough beguiling imagery to fill the halls of Versailles, but not only would additional pages on Café Society frocks been overkill, the novelty of the idea would, if carried out on even an additional spread, have lost its vigor and dynamicism.

Looking now at my much slimmer and much lighter September 2009 issue, it is nice to see that Coddington’s pièce de résistance, a spread of red frocks (the color of the season, ladies), carried out in a Little Red Riding Hood-themed fairy tale backdrop, was given 14-pages and that her dark and moody editorial on 1940s wartime fashion came in at 16. Whatever “these economic times” may or may not be, it is these type of vibrant visions that keeps me renewing my subscription. I may not be dropping $1,500 on red wool Marc Jacobs cape anytime soon, but Vogue’s admission of the piece in its pages will surely have me pulling out my very own vintage version this fall. And thanks to the suggestions of Grace and Anna, I’ll be pairing it back to knee-high leather boots, 1940s suiting, and ruffled ivory blouses. 

The September Issue opens September 11 at the Landmark Edina Cinema.

Read Christy DeSmith's review of The September issue.