I went to see "The September Issue" at the Edina Cinema tonight. It told a good story, focusing on Vogue's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's management of both the issue's development and how that parallel's her dominant role in the fashion world as a whole. Grace Coddington, Vogue's creative director features heavily as well. The documentary plays her more focused creativity of putting together fashions and photo shoots to create a specific story against Anna's grand scheme about what fashion and fashion in Vogue is. They might well be over stressing the conflict between the two, though. Throughout the movie there are repeated scenes of Grace doing a photo shoots followed by Anna cutting her favorite shots out of the spread. Yet you get one little hint at the end that all's not gloom and doom when we find out that, save the cover spread and one other, the entire issue is Grace's work.
I enjoyed it, though. It's not really my type of movie, I'm not really in to documentaries or fashion, but the review promised an insider's view of how Vogue worked. And I'm a sucker for seeing how businesses work.
Anna Wintour is portrayed as having a huge amount of influence on the fashion industry in general and ironclad control over her magazine. So if one person can make the fashion industry go round, what can't we hire one person to, say, get the auto industry back on it's feet or straighten out those greedy guys on Wall street?
Influence. There are a large number of factors, but I think influence is one of the most important. The fashion industry chooses to follow a leader, they aren't forced to. And that leader can probably only manipulate the industry so much. She chooses what things to emphasize, but her choices are constrained by what the industry is producing and the public wants to buy. She picks some dresses to feature but not others, all of them are pretty, any of them would work, and she doesn't necessarily even pick the best. But when she picks something and holds it out, be it a style or a theme, she gives the market something to coalesce around. She picks from the good-enoughs, she doesn't start from scratch.
She's also only in control of one firm. If her picks stray too far from what people want to buy, her firm will become less important and her influence will wane. She was never nominated or elected, people began following her because she made good decisions, and her influence requires a quorum of people willing to follow. There isn't that feedback with a CEO pay czar, people can't stop listening to him and start listening to the CEO pay dauphine when he drifts away from their preferences. Rather than making a decision, seeing the reaction, and adjusting so reaction to the next decision is better, the government official makes a decision, sees the reaction, then has to increase his sphere of influence to get reaction closer to what he intends on his next decision. Influence verses control.
The movie was great at showing influence verses control. Anna rules her magazine completely and thoroughly, she decides what is to be featured, who shall do it and what is to be emphasized. Yet, despite this high level of control and very limited number of people involved, the results of her direction are never exactly what she intends. They're close, usually good enough, but she's always frustrated because they don't end up how she envisioned them. She has a tremendous amount of influence but she can't even control the output of someone she's worked with for 20 years. How can a healthcare czar, then, hope to control the output of millions of people he'll never meet?
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