Fashion – Bitch Flicks

‘Iris’: One Older Icon’s Portrait of Another

The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

In the exact same way that movie and TV actresses have become thinner as the rest of the population have become larger, characters in movies and TV are becoming younger as the population ages. Not just Harry Potter, but a plethora of underage protagonists (often from books in the young adult–YA–category) are onscreen, enough to make me want to never again watch a film in which all the main characters attend high school. Being very young isn’t usually interesting, even to those who are very young, a reality YA novels and films themselves seem to acknowledge with popular dystopic settings in which young teenagers fight for their lives instead of worrying whether they studied enough to get a decent grade on the history test.

Current mainstream and even “indie” narrative film portrayals of older women are pathetic: women graduate from being the girlfriend to the wife to the mother to the grandmother without ever accruing a personality; even those quirky, cranky grandmas who talk dirty for “comic” relief are a tired trope that should be retired immediately. Documentaries are the few films where older women are allowed the complexity they have in real life (like the grandmother we currently have running for the US presidency). Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me showed a woman toward the end of her career (and close to the end of her life) who, despite some serious health problems, wasn’t the mess our worst suspicions about older people, particularly older women, might make us think she would be. Instead she was a funny, frank woman who was trying to figure out each day–just as those of us who aren’t in our 80s try to do.

Iris, currently in theaters (which I saw as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston), is one of the last documentaries directed by Albert Maysles (who died in March at 88) a pioneer of cinéma vérité, which even those not familiar with the term recognize as the predominant style of documentaries today. The center of the film is Iris Apfel, who although she had a successful career as an interior and textile designer when she was younger (she and her husband/business partner, Carl, who turns 100 during the film, talk briefly about her work at the White House and he lets slip that “We had a problem with Jackie,”) became well known to a wider public when, as a last minute substitution for another exhibit, a collection of the distinctive outfits she put together for herself (always pants and a top often accessorized by trademark layers of big heavy necklaces which catch the eye like the iridescent breast plumage of exotic birds) became a surprise hit. The exhibit traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Norton Museum of Art in Florida and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts–making her a star at 84.

IrisBW — Iris in her Park Avenue apartment

At 93 she continues to wear outfits that sometimes straddle the edge between “genius” and “over the top.” She also does work associated with fashion–debuting (and selling out) a collection on the Home Shopping Network, beautifully styling several career women (including three Black women with wildly different body types and style preferences) as part of a special event for the women’s clothing store (now online only), Loehmann’s (Apfel has her own memory of the original “Mrs. Loehmann” who told her when she was a young woman, “‘You’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter. You have something much better. You have style'”), attending fashion events and even making an appearance on a magazine cover (the outfit the stylists put her in is, of course, the least flattering one she wears in the film).

But she also has the concerns of an older person, telling us she feels the same as an older woman she knew when she was young who told her, “Everything I have two of, one hurts.” Her husband has also “not been feeling well” and is anxious about her well-being too, so she keeps from him that she has broken her hip (which she gets surgery for). Her nephew tells us that she’s told him that she keeps herself busy to stave off depression. She has begun sending away a lot of her outfits to be stored for posterity and to sell off the many items the couple have kept in storage which can’t fit into the Park Avenue apartment crowded with so many one-of-a-kind pieces (like a life-size wooden ostrich whose wing flips up to reveal a small built-in bar) it looks more like a specialty shop–or movie set–than a place where people live.

But none of these complications keep Iris from being delightful company–telling us how all the older women she socializes with have a crush on the filmmaker, her relish in haggling with a Harlem shopkeeper about items she wants to buy or a sudden intense alertness, like a cat stalking prey, when she sees a runway fashion that captures her fancy. Iris, in spite of interests many people consider superficial, is an incisive wit and not in the least flighty, hesitant or forgetful in conversation. When asked why she never had children she simply states that she wanted to work, to travel (her search for items that no other designer could provide led her all over the world), that she didn’t want her child to be raised by a nanny and concludes (in defiance of the paradigm of women “having it all”) “you can’t have everything.”

She and her husband, Carl, aren’t the cantankerous older couple we’re used to seeing onscreen but two people who complement one another (Iris buys the brightly colored and intricately patterned pants he wears with fairly conservative shirts and jackets) and after nearly seven decades together they still seem to enjoy each other’s company. She’s also not critical about what others choose to wear. At one point the photographer Bruce Weber tells her that he hasn’t once heard her badmouth anyone else’s fashion sense and she says, “I can’t judge… It’s better to be happy than well-dressed.”

Maysles, whose much lauded career included Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, doesn’t just coast on his reputation in Iris: he brings a perspective a younger filmmaker probably could not. We see a tinge of melancholy in the well-wishes, speeches and cake at Carl’s 100th birthday and that mood seems more in keeping for a man whose health isn’t great and may not make it to his next birthday than the relentlessly cheerful “Happy 100th to you” shout-outs of morning television, always delivered by people who aren’t close to that age themselves. Iris’s life is neither filled with loss nor one long, jaunt of constant happiness, but a combination, like the lives the rest of us will lead.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8jwJ_2l0c” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Travel Films Week: ‘Sex and the City 2’: Hardcore Orientalism in the Desert of Abu Dhabi

The story of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha continued in Sex and the City 2 (2010)

This is a guest post by Emily Contois.

I’m not embarrassed to admit it. I totally own the complete series of Sex and the City—the copious collection of DVDs nestled inside a bright pink binder-of-sorts, soft and textured to the touch. In college, I forged real-life friendships over watching episodes of the show, giggling together on the floor of dorm rooms and tiny apartments. Through years of watching these episodes over and over again, and as sad as it may sound, I came to view Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha like friends—not really real, but only a click of the play button away.

On opening night in a packed theater house with two of my friends, I went to see the first Sex and the City movie in 2008. Was the story perfect? No. But it effectively and enjoyably continued the story arc of these four friends, and it made some sort of sense. Fast forward to 2010 when Sex and the City 2 came to theaters. I had seen the trailer. I’ll admit, I was a bit bemused. The girls are going to Abu Dhabi? Um, okay. Sex and the City had taken us to international locales before. In the final season, Carrie joins Petrovsky in Paris and in this land of mythical romance, Mr. Big finds her and sets everything right. When their wedding goes awry in the first movie, the girls jet to Mexico, taking Carrie and Big’s honeymoon as a female foursome. But the vast majority of this story takes place in New York City. It’s called Sex and the City. The city is not only a setting, but also a character unto itself and plays a major role in the narrative. So, it seemed a little odd that the majority of the second movie would take place on the sands of Abu Dhabi.

In Sex and the City 2, the leading ladies travel to Abu Dhabi

Before the girls settle in to those first-class suites on the flight to the United Arab Emirates, however, we as viewers must suffer through Stanford and Anthony’s wedding. From these opening scenes, there’s no question why this dismal film swept the 2011 Razzie Awards, where the four leading ladies shared the Worst Actress Award and the Worst Screen Ensemble. How did this happen?? These four ladies were once believable to fans as soul mates—four women sharing a friendship closer than a marriage. And yet they end up in these opening scenes interacting like a blind group date—awkward, forced, and cringe-worthy.

As our once favorite characters slowly warm up to one another, Michael Patrick King’s weak screenplay lays some groundwork for the film’s plot, all of which establish that these women are not traveling to an exotic locale for fun and adventure. They’re escaping—and from decidedly white people problems at that. Carrie from a hot marriage settling all too quickly into a routine of couch, TV, and takeout. Miranda from the stresses of a job she just quit. Charlotte from an always-crying-terrible-two-baby-girl and a worrisomely, buxom nanny. And Samantha, well, isn’t escaping anything. Her entire life has been reduced even further to beating menopause with an army of all natural pharmaceuticals, which fuel full-volume sexual interludes. As such, this all-expense-paid vacation to the Middle East serves as an escape filled with a little girl time and a lot of bold, overt, and luxurious consumption.

From the moment our Sex and the City stars have decided to take this trip together, however, Abu Dhabi is viewed through a lens of Orientalism, demonstrating a Western patronization of the Middle East. Starting on the first day in the city, Abu Dhabi is framed derisively as the polar opposite of sexy and modern New York City. It’s also stereotypically portrayed as the world of Disney’s Jasmine and Aladdin, magic carpets, camels, and desert dunes—”but with cocktails,” Carrie adds. This borderline racist trope plays out vividly through the women’s vacation attire of patterned head wraps, flowing skirts, and breezy cropped pants. Take for example their over-the-top fashion statement as they explore the desert on camelback, only after they have dramatically walked across the sand directly toward the camera of course.

Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie, and Miranda explore the desert, dressed in a ridiculous ode to the Middle East via fashion

The exotic is also framed as dangerous and tempting, embodied in Aidan, Carrie’s once fiancé, who sweeps her off her feet in Abu Dhabi and nearly derails her fidelity. This plays out metaphorically as they meet at Aidan’s hotel, both of them dressed in black and cloaked in the dim lighting of the restaurant.

Carrie “plays with fire” when she meets old flam, Aidan, for dinner in Abu Dhabi

Sex and the City 2 also comments upon gender roles and sex in the Middle East. For example, in a nightclub full of belly dancers and karaoke, our New Yorkers choose to sing “I Am Woman,” a tune that served as a theme song of sorts for second wave feminism. As our once fab four belt out the lyrics, young Arabic women sing along as well. And yet the main tenant of the film appears to be an ode to perceived sexual repression rather than women’s rights.

The ladies of Sex and the City 2 sing “I Am Woman” at karaoke in an Abu Dhabi nightclut

Abu Dhabi is a place where these four women—defined in American culture not only by their longstanding friendship, but also by their bodies, fashionable wardrobes, and sexual exploits—must tone it down a bit. For example, Miranda reads from a guidebook that women are required to dress in a way that doesn’t attract sexual attention. Instead of providing any context in which to understand the customs of another culture, Samantha instead repeatedly whines about having to cover up her body. Our four Americans watch a Muslim woman eating fries while wearing a veil over her face, as if observing an animal in a zoo. The girls poke fun at the women floating in the hotel pool covered from head to ankle in burkinins, which Carrie jokingly comments are for sale in the hotel gift shop. In this way, Arab culture is both commodified and ridiculed. And rather than finding a place of common understanding, the American characters are only able to relate to Arab women by finding them to be exactly like them, secretly wearing couture beneath their burkas. While fashion is the common thread linking these American and Arab women, the four leading ladies don’t really come to understand the role and meaning of the burka. Instead, after Samantha causes a raucous in the market, the girls don burkas as a comedic disguise in order to escape.

At this point in the film, the main narrative conflict is again a very white problem—if the ladies are late to the airport, they’ll (gasp!) be bumped from first class. Struggling to get a cab to stop and pick them up, the women have to get creative. In a bizarre twist that references a scene from the first twenty minutes of the film, Carrie hails a cab by exposing her leg, as made famous in the classic film, It Happened One Night. While she gets a cab to stop, one is struck by the inconsistency. The women were just run out of town for Samantha’s overt sexuality and yet exposing a culturally forbidden view of a woman’s leg is what saves the day? Or is the moral of the story that a car will always stop for a sexy woman, irrespective of culture? Either way, our leading ladies make it to the airport, fly home in first-class luxury, and arrive home to better appreciate their lives. No real conflict has been resolved—though a 60-second montage provides sound bites of what each character has learned.

In homage to It Happened One Night, Carrie bares her leg to get a cab to stop in Abu Dhabi

Throughout the course of Sex and the City 2, the United Arab Emirates doesn’t fair well, but neither does the United States, as the land of the free and home of the brave is reduced to a place where Samantha Jones can have sex in public without getting arrested. Sex and the City 2 stands out as a horrendous example of American entitlement abroad, a terrible travel flick, and a truly saddening chapter for those of us who actually liked Sex and the City up to this point.

Emily Contois works in the field of worksite wellness and is a graduate student in the MLA in Gastronomy Program at Boston University that was founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pépin. She is currently researching the marketing of diet programs to men and blogs on food studies, nutrition, and public health at emilycontois.com.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Buffy Kicks Ass

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Guest post written by Erin K. O’Neill originally published at FemThreads. Cross-posted with permission.

“We saved the world, I say we party. I mean, I got all pretty.” ~ Buffy Summers

“Yes, date. And shop and hang out and go to school and save the world from unspeakable demons. You know, I wanna do girlie stuff.” ~ Buffy Summers

Let us now discuss the epic feminist awesomeness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is exactly what it sounds like: A girl, named Buffy Summers, slays vampires and demons and wages war against evil supernatural forces. The major complicating factor? She’s a blonde, fashion-and-boy-obsessed California high school student who becomes a social outcast because of her secret identity and nighttime activities.

But first, a short personal history lesson:

One fall night in sixth grade, my B.F.F. Marcella came over after swim practice. She made a big stink about watching Buffy that night, since it was the second season premiere. I was reluctant to watch, as up to that point fantasy/horror hybrids were really not my thing (I was still in a lengthy L.M. Montgomery phase). However, Marcella sat my ass down and made me watch it. It was love at first (I’m so sorry) … bite.

In middle school Marcella and I used Buffy to cement our friendship. It held through attending separate high schools and my yearlong absence while I was an exchange student in Australia. We religiously analyzed last night’s Buffy episode every Wednesday at lunch. I had a buff-colored kitten named Buffy, and Marcella had a black kitten named Angel (after Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend). Marcella got all the DVDs as soon as they came out, and we would often soothe our teenage angst (break-ups, placing badly in the state water polo tournament, rejection by our first-choice colleges, etc.) with mochas and Buffy marathons. It became a common language of cultural and fashion references that were always fodder for conversation (and often girlish shrieking). When our other commonalities fell away as we grew up and away from each other,
Buffy kept us together.

But I digress.

Buffy created by Joss Whedon

The coolest thing about Buffy is that creator Joss Whedon conceptualized the show as a deliberate inversion of horror movie clichés. In traditional horror, when the girl wanders into a dark ally the audience expects her to meet a horrible fate. On Buffy, the girl hunts the monster in that ally, and then fights and defeats it. Whedon purposely created the show as a way to subvert and redefine the audience’s expectations about women.

The show layered this feminist perspective upon a strong tradition of high school and coming-of-age-stories in American pop culture. “In Buffy‘s world, by contrast, the problems teenagers face become literal monsters,” Rhonda Wilcox wrote in an essay in the Journal of Popular Film and Television. “Internet predators are demons; drink-doctoring frat boys have sold their souls for success in the business world; a girl who has sex with even the nicest-seeming male discovers that he afterwards becomes a monster.”

There is a lot of scholarly research and criticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Buffy Studies.” There’s even an academic journal called Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. No, I’m not kidding. The show has become a bit of a zeitgeist for feminist criticism, in particular for scholars interested in Third Wave Feminism.

And then, of course, Buffy kicked a lot of ass. A very serious amount of ass. Over the course of the show’s seven television seasons, she averted multiple apocalypses. She punned and killed all very large monsters and vampires that she came across. She added clever insult to injury. She never apologized for not being a dumb, weak girl. And it was very physical — in the canon of the show, a Slayer is given extra-human powers of strength, speed and agility. She was a fashionable girl’s girl, and she slayed creatures that go bump in the night. It was Girl Power at its late-1990s peak and taken to an excellent extreme.

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)

Buffy deals with homework, dating and a single mother who’s just a bit clueless. Despite being labeled a loser, she navigates the social hierarchy of high school with her friends who assist in her fight against the undead. She goes through the many painful stages of sexual initiation and maturity. She fights the good fight of college admission, and later the decision to drop out of school when her mother dies and she must take care of a younger sister. She makes mistakes, and fails sometimes. While Buffy’s circumstances were different, they embodied situations and emotions I often felt as an adolescent trying to make my own way.

Buffy was not just a warrior, but a leader. Less than half way through the series, she quit taking orders from the Watcher’s Council, an ancient group of British people who identify and train the Slayer, and decides to go it alone with her friends. While Buffy defers research to her Watcher (who was fired from the Council) and friends Willow and Xander, she is the member of the darkness-battling team that makes, coordinates and executes the final plan. She essentially becomes the general of a guerrilla army, which becomes a more and more literal role as the series progresses.

Buffy is a hero. She has a destiny. She fought and died (twice). She saved the world a lot. And yet, the show wasn’t really about Buffy’s sacred duty to fight things that go bump in the night. It was, at it’s core, about how to deal with and survive the pressures of being a young woman in American society.

Buffy

And, hot damn, the girl looked good doing it. In the tradition of WB teen show characters dressing like they had unlimited budgets and stylists, Buffy had the BEST clothes. Well, for 1997-1999, she had the BEST clothes. If there was ever a fashion icon Marcella and I strove to emulate, it was Buffy. Her very short skirts, leather pants, spaghetti strap tank tops and platform boots were the holy grail of sartorial achievement in middle school (mostly because we had to fight our mothers to be allowed to leave the house dressed in them). Buffy rocked super-feminine styles tempered by leather, denim and practical pieces. While most of her wardrobe is horrifying in retrospect, there are still a few items I’d wear and rock the shit out of today.

In the first season finale, Buffy accessorizes a white satin and chiffon prom dress with a black leather jacket and a crossbow. Fashion doesn’t get more bad-ass than that.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a concept that could and did go terribly wrong. Its first incarnation, a 1992 movie of the same name, is awful. Yet the film showed signs of brilliance nonetheless. The TV show rectified all the problems of the movie, by making the fictional universe and characters deeper, wider, darker and much more interesting. The show wouldn’t have been such a phenomenon if it were crap. It really is excellent television on all levels. The writing was clever and intelligent without being preachy, the characters were real, and the action was fantastic. It is really fun to watch. Joss Whedon is a singular talent—he really can do no wrong. He loves super-powered women, and that shows in all aspects of his storytelling.

Looking back, I honestly believe that Buffy had a profound effect on my own development as a feminist thinker. At the time, I was just watching a cool show with fun dialogue, tragic romance and drool-worthy shoes. But I internalized a lot of the subtext and it helped shaped how I view modern womanhood: A girl can kick ass, and look pretty doing it.

Erin K. O’Neill is an award-winning writer, photographer, visual editor, and digital marketing professional currently located in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. A devotee of literature, photography, existentialism, and all things Australian, Erin also watches too much television on DVD and Netflix. Follow her on Twitter, @ekoneill.

Biopic and Documentary Week: The September Issue

This review of The September Issue, by Amber Leab, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 7, 2011.

Anna Wintour has Power. She jokes that her siblings find what she does for a living “peculiar,” because maybe editing a fashion magazine doesn’t affect world politics, or cure diseases, or save the world. But high fashion is art, and art is peculiar. Amid the ads for cosmetics (which probably contain ingredients that no one should be putting on her or his skin) and accessories few of us can afford, there are stunning photographs of beautiful clothes. Most of the clothes aren’t really meant to be worn in Real Life, but they are pieces of art, and the people who make this wearable art fall all over themselves hoping that Wintour will notice them. They cater to her every whim, her every pointed critique.

Perhaps Wintour finds her position a bit peculiar, as well. There’s a drive viewers can see in her, and it seems as if she’s blindly plowing ahead, following success after success with little reflection about the why of it all. Her daughter appears to have no interest in the fashion industry, even though there’s a simple, ready-made path for her there. Like her mother, she doesn’t elaborate on her opinions, but knows that the industry isn’t for her. Wintour herself doesn’t really have much to say about what she’s achieved; she’s not the type to wax philosophically. Instead she states–and shows viewers–very plainly that she works hard and that the magazine has earned her a lot of money.

Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour

Fortunately, the movie also features Wintour’s team at Vogue, one of whom emerges to become the real star of The September Issue.

Grace Coddington is a former model and the creative director at Vogue. She even started working there on the same day as Wintour. She is intelligent, reflective, and an artist to Wintour’s manager persona. Coddington isn’t afraid to stand up to Wintour (whose lack of empathy was famously fictionalized by Meryl Streep in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada) either, and flawlessly uses her every resource, including the documentary film crew, to her advantage. Viewers may see her as being cutthroat, but she’s an artist fighting for her vision, her work, and she’s earned it. She’s 68 and has spent her whole life in this industry, working for British Vogue and Calvin Klein before joining Wintour.

Click here to read the rest of the piece, and to watch a preview of The September Issue.

Documentary Review: The September Issue

The September Issue (2009), directed by R.J. Cutler.

Fashion is a bit of an anomaly in capitalist enterprise, in that its major players are primarily women and gay men. Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, is the “single most important figure in the 300 billion dollar global fashion industry.” The September Issue chronicles the assembly of the massive 2007 fall fashion issue of the magazine.

Before getting into any specifics about the film, I want to say a thing or two about fashion, because it’s a subject–and an industry–about which I feel a great deal of ambivalence. Last March, when Stephanie and I reviewed Sex and the City: The Movie for this website, I struggled to pinpoint my perspective on fashion, and left it at this:

I like fashion. It’s an art form, and its creators are capable of beautiful design and cultural statements. It’s also an industry, and like all major industries, has a very ugly side. I liken it to professional sports: I watch from the sidelines, aware of the way I’m being manipulated, but enjoy it nonetheless—all without expressly participating.

I don’t think my perspective today is as sunny, nor would I necessarily choose the same sports metaphor. Yes, fashion is an art form, and designers truly do create magnificent works of art. Its “ugly side” isn’t so easy to overlook, though–particularly the endless number of rail-thin, anorexic-looking models reinforcing society’s ideal body type, which is unachievable for a vast majority of women. Fashion magazines not only perpetuate the idealization of the stick-skinny model, but also tell women, in page after page, that they aren’t good enough, and that they need to spend massive amounts of time, energy, and money on looking (read: being) better.

Here’s the thing, though: Despite my problems with the industry on display, I really like The September Issue, for a number of reasons.

Sitting down to watch TSI, I expected the film to explore the glamorous life of Anna Wintour. At least I expected that to be a major element of the film, but viewers actually learn very little about her–there isn’t a lot of insight into her life or her motivations, aside from what appears in the film’s trailer (which appears at the bottom of this post). Perhaps it was foolish to believe that this notoriously private woman would reveal herself in a documentary focused on her magazine, but we do get a few poignant moments of insight amidst all the meetings, photo shoots, disagreements, and jet setting.

Fortunately, the movie also features Wintour’s team at Vogue, one of whom emerges to become the real star of The September Issue.

Eventually, Coddington gets so palsy-walsy that she puts one of the September Issue cameramen into a last-minute photo shoot as a prop. The resulting pictures are fresh and fun and even manage to make Anna smile, although it’s not clear if she likes the pics or is just enjoying telling a middle-aged cameraman that he’s too fat. When Coddington hears that Wintour wants to Photoshop out his belly, she gets on the phone and threatens the art director and tells him that he has to leave it alone. “Not everything can be perfect in the world,” she rails. It is the climax of the movie, where Coddington eventually triumphs over the tyrant, who has been chipping away at her artistic integrity for the entire 90 minutes.

Of course, Gawker can’t help but pit these two women against each other–using words like “stole,” “palsy-walsy” (whatever that means, it doesn’t sound like a compliment), “rails,” and “tyrant” to pigeonhole their working relationship as a catty, woman-against-woman, oh-so-typical drama. While I love that Coddington fights to keep the photo of the cameraman un-retouched, I do wish that a woman with a belly could appear in the pages of Vogue. The moment, however, is a stroke of genius. The issue of the magazine had certainly been affected by the film crew being there, and Coddington found a way to literally put them into it.

While Coddington expresses enormous respect for Wintour, she isn’t afraid to speak her mind. Pontificating on the magazine in the back of a car, she mentions how little she likes the rise of celebrity culture and the practice of using actresses as cover models (the fall fashion issue features Sienna Miller on the cover), but concedes that Wintour knew this was the future of fashion mags and put the idea into action first.

At times we get the feeling that Coddington doesn’t really know how or why she got to this point in her career, but she’s very good at her job. Throughout the film we see exquisitely detailed photo shoots where she seems to be in her element and having a genuinely good time. The squabbles with Wintour over keeping her work in the issue upset Coddington, however, and make her nearly question the whole enterprise. Somehow, I get the feeling that if she walked out the Vogue office doors and never came back, she’d be just fine. Wintour never lets viewers in enough for us to even speculate, maintaining her ice queen reputation and doing so with less humor than her fictional counterpart.

Yes, there is drama in the film, and some of it even seems like stereotypical fashion magazine fare, but what remains remarkable is seeing two talented women in their sixties running a fashion empire, working together, clashing over their visions for the issue, all while expressing enormous respect for one another, and doing it all with intelligence and glamour.