There is nothing I love more than a fashion documentary in which you have to look up at least one of the contributors online to make sure he or she is real. What joy to find that In Vogue: The 90s has two of them. Three if you count the legendary editor Anna Wintour herself, in whom you would not believe if she wasn’t already part of the cultural landscape.
The first is Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, the fashion director of Vogue US who styled Wintour’s first cover when the latter was brought over from Vogue UK in 1988 to give its transatlantic cousin a makeover. What was Vogue US like before Anna arrived? “BOOOOOOORRRRRIIIIIING!” rasps De Dudzeele, with more contempt than most of us could muster for a kitten murderer standing in front of us. Later, her face contorts with agony as she remembers “gruuuuuunge … I didn’t like the idea to look poor when you are not poor”. Kitten murderers would have a better chance of explaining themselves to her.
The second is Hamish Bowles, who worked for Wintour at American Vogue from 1992. He looks like a fantastically chic Lego figure and I would follow him to the ends of the Earth. When he remembers gruuuuuunge, it is in a pained whisper – a mind barely able to comprehend, let alone articulate, the horrors it has seen.
The first episode concentrates on the magazine and Wintour’s arrival. “A Warholian enigma,” says Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, the man behind the famous interview in which Linda Evangelista said that supermodels “don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day”. “A chic, strong bosswoman,” says Kim Kardashian, whose true position in Wintour’s mental firmament I would love to know.
Anyone who is anyone appears in this three-part documentary. Wintour’s lieutenant, nemesis and most points in between, Grace Coddington, a mesmeric Kate Moss, John Galliano, Elizabeth Hurley talking once more about That Dress, Gwyneth Paltrow, Naomi Campbell, Evangelista herself, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Miuccia Prada, Tom Ford (a kind of earnest vacuum, sucking the interest out of every moment he is on screen) and many more decorate proceedings. There’s also an awful lot from the former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful. Together, they somehow manage to contribute almost nothing that even the least Vogueish of us hasn’t heard before. The 90s “changed everything” we are told. Or, sometimes, “everything changed”.
We hear about the Madonna cover. That changed everything. Then the supermodel cover. That changed everything again. Then Kate Moss arrived and everything changed. Then Wintour gave the virtually unknown John Galliano a 12-page spread and that changed everything, or maybe just everything for John Galliano.
In later episodes, Vogue is less of the focus and the film looks at how it fitted into, picked up on and influenced the wider fashion world. But the most fascinating – inadvertently, I suspect – element of it all is observing first-hand (or as close as most of us are going to get and survive) the legendary marrow-deep confidence of Wintour. Not just in the crisp refusal to take off her sunglasses for interviews with the film-makers, but the easy admission of what she can and can’t do, her willingness to listen to others if they have equal confidence in their own ideas. There’s a self-ruthlessness that sits alongside her ruthlessness to others and makes her extraordinary.
As a documentary about either Vogue or the 90s, In Vogue: The 90s is average at best. But as a collection of people and clothes to marvel at, as a showcase for sheer talent and beauty as footage from the catwalks and shoots swirls, it does fabulously, darling.
In Vogue: The 90s is on Disney+ now.
