wintour wonderland

R.J. Cutler Still in Awe of Anna ‘the Machine’ Wintour

The DVD of The September Issue is out today (today!), and director R.J. Cutler has taken to promoting it in a medium the fashion industry is at once increasingly embracing and grappling with: blogging. Luckily, we as bloggers and you as blog readers can comprehend this method of communication, unlike many news outlets continuing to publish long articles on who these people are and what they mean. Cutler writes on the Huffington Post about what he learned about working and running a big ship from Anna Wintour when he followed her as he chronicled the making of the September 2007 issue of Vogue. Things may be different now, three years later, but who cares? What goes on at Vogue, the CBS of women’s magazines, is still inexplicably fascinating. He writes:

Anna’s assistant would email me her schedule for the following day and my crew and I would plan which of her meetings to film. For me, just reading her daily schedule was startling — the parade of editors, stylists, designers, writers, models, art directors, photographers, retailers, filmmakers, actresses, socialites, moguls, politicians and even the occasional tennis player was head-spinning.


So how does Anna do it all? Aside from being a machine:

In Anna’s world, meetings often start a few minutes before they’re scheduled. If you arrive five minutes late, chances are you’ll have missed it entirely. Imagine the hours of time that are saved every day by not wasting so much of it in meetings.


That’s very clever. Schedule a meeting, when everyone arrives on time tell them they’ve missed it, and you get out of the meeting entirely while making the staff feel like slackers. Benefits of being the boss.

Also, it must be noted that R.J. Cutler is a pretty good fashion blogger! Although:

Seriously, filming The September Issue was like walking into the clubhouse of the 1927 Yankees — every one of these people (Andre Leon Talley, Tonne Goodman, Sally Singer, Virginia Smith, Phyllis Posnick, Hamish Bowles, Elissa Santisi, Alexandra Kotur and on and on) is a future Hall of Famer.


We’d cut the sports references. Unless their uniforms are tight and glitter, it’s all over our heads.

Bloggers are snapping up front row seats at London Fashion Week [HuffPo]

R.J. Cutler Still in Awe of Anna ‘the Machine’ Wintour