What Anna Wintour Left Out of That Hulu Series
Yet another docu-series selectively remembers fashion in the nineties.
Anna Wintour has said repeatedly that she doesn’t like dwelling on the past. “Fashion’s not about looking back, it’s always about looking forward,” she said in R.J. Cutler’s 2009 documentary The September Issue. As I reported in ANNA: The Biography, when she was taking over Style.com and was asked what she thought about Throwback Thursday, she said, “Irrelevant,” because, “Nobody wants to go back into the past, you have to go into the future.” In 2019, Vogue.com published a story titled, “Thanks for the Memories? Nostalgia Is No Good for Fashion.”
So it would seem curious that she has wanted Vogue to undertake multiple, in-depth explorations of the nineties. In 2020, Vogue published a podcast series about the nineties. Recently, Hulu debuted a six-part documentary series In Vogue: The 90s, a nearly six-hour look at things that happened in fashion in the nineties as Anna and Vogue would like them to be remembered.
Anna was first the star of a documentary for The September Issue. As I report in ANNA, she didn’t like how the film came out, telling Cutler it was “two old ladies squabbling in the hallway” (referring to her and Vogue’s then-creative director Grace Coddington). She told Cutler — who got final cut — that his film lacked glamour. She got the documentary she wanted in 2016’s The First Monday in May about the Met Gala, which members of her staff helped produce.
The Hulu series lists Anna and Vogue editors Edward Enninful, Tonne Goodman, and Hamish Bowles, along with other Condé Nast staff, as producers, so this is Anna’s story as she wants it told. You could call it legacy-washing. She turns 75 on November 3, and I’m guessing is trying to solidify her legacy before she leaves Condé Nast. After all, she can’t do her job forever.
Earlier in Back Row
I would guess that Anna wants to dwell now on the nineties — which feels particularly rehashed after the Supermodels series, also produced by its subjects — because it was the one full decade she was leading Vogue that things were pretty good for her. In the aughts, the recession forever changed legacy media, jumpstarting a downward spiral of bdget cuts and layoffs in which she’s still trapped. In more recent years, she’s been forced to confront Vogue’s long history of white-washing, which this series acknowledged as a fashion problem, less so a Vogue one.
I am not a normal viewer of this documentary by any means, but I kept thinking about how a more honest look at the decade would have yielded a much more interesting show. Here is the history that In Vogue left out.
In the nineties, Anna did not want body diversity in Vogue. In Vogue includes a section on “heroin chic,” as epitomized by Kate Moss in a particular lingerie shoot for British Vogue in 1993 that became controversial owing to her thinness. Tonne Goodman recalled, “Those images certainly did not look healthy, they did not look well-fed, and this is going to be something that’s going to become a trend? This is going to be something we’re going to embrace and endorse?”
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