Word: coddington
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...does it, and who she does it with,” Cutler says. “But she knew that I was interested in who she was a person.” The film also focuses on Wintour’s infamous professional relationship with creative director Grace Coddington, a fire-haired industry veteran who harbors enough warmth and emotion to fend off nearly all of her co-worker’s stinging barbs. Exercising “complete creative control” over the project, Cutler and his crew spent months in and around the Vogue offices during preparation...
...year-old former model, Coddington moved behind the scenes after a car accident scarred her face. She arrived at American Vogue on the same day in July 1988 as Wintour. She, too, no doubt wears Prada, but the chief impression we get of her is that of a beautiful elderly hippie in droopy black sacks who drifts through Vogue's corridors in a haze of either artistic irritation or inspiration. If Wintour is the Pope (as one Vogue staffer calls the boss), Coddington is Michelangelo, trying to paint a fresh version of the Sistine Chapel 12 times a year amid...
...Room and co-directed A Perfect Candidate, sticks to it, looking for more illustrations of conflict between the masthead's two giant feminine forces - like the scene in which Wintour eyes the results of a $50,000 photo shoot inspired by John Galliano designs and starts slashing. Coddington moans to co-workers, "She's killed half of it." Coddington is the creative sponge who soaks up beauty on behalf of Vogue, while Wintour is the hand squeezing it. Mean Anna! Devil Anna...
...wait. Is it possible that Wintour isn't so much a sponge-squeezing killjoy as simply ... an editor? She names decisiveness as her greatest strength, and the movie shows her making good decisions, rapidly and repeatedly. The first picture Wintour vetoes from Coddington's treasured shoot is distractingly fussy and rococo. Grace mopes, but the magazine benefits. At the film's climax, Cutler plays up the drama of Coddington's refusal to allow an appealing but not-quite-model-standard image to be digitally nipped and tucked at Wintour's request. It's lively storytelling, except that Wintour's suggestion...
...Flattering ones. And if she knows her own mind, she also knows when to change it. As Cutler pans over the final layout for September 2007, complete after a half-year's labor, the camera catches the image of a zany rubber dress from an early "textures" shoot that Coddington had loved but Wintour had removed. There it was, bound for the newsstands. Was it restored in service of the story or in deference to her invaluable right-hand woman? Only Anna knows for sure...