Say Do You Remember?

Photographed By Ellinor Forje

“How much does it weigh, and how many pages?”

It’s one of the questions asked by a Condé Nast executive during a boardroom meeting about Vogue’s September issue. Remember the 2007 one, with Sienna Miller on the cover?

I discovered the infamous edition under my bed two days ago. I don’t remember what I was originally looking for, but there it was, in all its 1,000-page splendour. I’d forgotten quite how enormous it was, and the motive behind its magnitude. They wanted to break a record. They broke it, and then some.

Yes, size does count. Don’t let anybody fool you into thinking otherwise.

My rather Livingstonian discovery prompted me to re-watch “The September Issue” (2009), and I think I appreciated the documentary more this time than I did on my first viewing. Back then, I was primarily interested in the business and creative machinery of publishing. This time, I found myself paying closer attention to the personalities, their mindsets and, perhaps most interestingly, the way they interact with one another.

There are several moments in the film that resonate with me. Anna Wintour asking photographer Mario Testino, in the middle of a creative session, whether he’d seen Roger Federer play the other day is completely irrelevant to the task at hand, yet somehow perfect for the moment. Creativity, after all, doesn’t always arrive according to the agenda.

Then there’s Grace Coddington recalling something one of her mentors once told her: “Always keep your eyes open, because whatever you see out of the window can inspire you.” It more or less sums up her modus operandi, and perhaps explains why her work feels so observant and richly imagined.

And last, but certainly not least, André Leon Talley playing tennis.

You need to watch the film for this alone. It’s a riot. Talley looks fabulous in his Louis Vuitton gear, naturally, and I have enormous respect for the genius that he was, but this should probably be the first and last time the word “tennis” and the names “Federer” and “Talley” appear in the same film, let alone the same paragraph.

R.J. Cutler, are you listening?

Anyway, back to Vogue.

While flicking through the pages of my rediscovered copy, I stumbled across a Nordstrom advertisement I’d completely forgotten about. The illustrations stopped me in my tracks, so I thought I’d share them with you.

I’m in love with them.

They almost beat the cover.