Vogue’s world of high fashion seems as far removed as possible from my life of wear-whatever-is-clean with hair hastily thrown up in a top-knot- or so I thought, before watching the movie “The September Issue”. Vogue Magazine’s internal runnings has countless parallels to the design and publishing world that I am aiming to break into in the next few years, so much so that it is worth commenting on.
Anna Winters, the Editor-in-Chief, reigns over any and all decisions that need to be made for Vogue magazine to run smoothly and to the highest caliber possible. Throughout the film, she appears to be the poker-faced fashion dictator that simultaneously irks and awes all who work under her (not to mention the press and the world at large). Much like a Creative Director in an agency, she is involved in most choices, from the seemingly most menial to the highest of levels. Her decisions influence not only the course of the magazine, but also fashion trends globally. In terms of her impact on Vogue itself, she performs such roles as choosing models, having the final say on all spreads and design and, arguably most importantly, tells people the hard truth about their ideas.
Anna’s most crucial counterpart in Vogue, aptly the second-most featured person in the documentary, is Fashion Editor Grace Coddington. In this position, Grace imagines and oversees the feature photo shoots for the magazine, including sourcing and selecting the clothing and accessories and styling the models. Grace’s vision and creative abilities are constantly, in the movie at least, fighting against Anna’s power as final decision maker. Grace says, at one point, “you have to beat your way through to be felt and feel necessary…[and] have to be tough to withstand the heartbreak”. This heartbreak is a common thread throughout the film, as ideas and creations are constantly cut without remorse.
Watching Grace struggling to cope with artistic rejection and disappointment even after her 20+ years in the business was very surprising and sobering. I often combat the same disappointments, but have often consoled myself with the belief that these feelings would diminish the more times I faced them through my work. As Grace puts it, “You care a lot about your work and it gets thrown out…it’s hard to go on to the next thing”. The knowledge that these feelings will stay with me, perhaps throughout my whole career, is at once troubling and comforting, as is the knowledge that I will have to continually work on developing a thicker skin. As mentioned in the film, fashion, much like design, is not about looking back, it’s about looking forward.
It struck me as interesting that, at Vogue, the Editor in Chief acts much like a design agency’s Creative Director would. I don’t have direct experience working with a Creative Director at this point, but my impression is that they would not be as cold, aloof and dictatorial as Anna appears to me (or, perhaps, this is wishful thinking!). My sense is that there would be more of a creative dialogue that occurs between the Anna’s (Creative Directors) and the Grace’s (Art Directors) of the design world and things would not lean so heavily towards accepting the top-down orders without question, even though they would still be the one ultimately responsible for the execution and final product.
Throughout watching, I loved seeing the pervasiveness of the design stages I have come to know (idea generation, idea pitching, sketches, mock-ups, etcetera) in both the magazine production process and the design process. It seemed, at times, that Anna acted almost like a client in many situations, with the other employees trying working through their ideas only to have the ‘client’ shoot it down in the end. The magazine world seems more disjointed than a design studio, because the various creative departments will work on shoots or projects without the go-ahead of the Editor in Chief first. These situations seem to beg disappointment more than in a design agency.
Even at such a high-level of sophistication and production, it surprised me that things still went wrong as much as they seemed to in the making of a single product. It was interesting to watch things unfold with their cover photo shoot, and see the communication disconnect between the highly coveted photographer and what Vogue actually envisioned. These creative miscommunications, it seems, can happen at any level.
Tear-Knee Design 