While everyone is compiling their year-end (and decade-end) best-of lists, I thought it might be a good idea to take another look at this piece. While The September Issue wasn’t the best movie I saw this year, it was certainly one of the most though-provoking, especially as a member of the print media.
Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.
So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH, I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.
***
Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.
I’d always known that at least on a relative scale, my family was doing all right. My parents came from different economic backgrounds—my mother was the only daughter of a wealthy small-town doctor while my dad was one of five kids in a working-class neighborhood—but both were college graduates who worked hard to create the suburban enclave where my brother and I grew up. Those varied backgrounds sometimes clashed when it came to relatively small matters like after-school jobs, but we were never overly indulged. In contrast to some of my peers, I got a hand-me-down minivan when I turned 16 instead of a souped-up sports car, and my parents only grudgingly allowed me my own phone in my teenage years while friends of mine had their own home entertainment centers.
