Beauty and the Beast?

Vogue Editor Anna Wintour, left, is the very picture of fashion, yet in the film about that magazine, The September Issue, the audience groans every time she extends a well-polished talon and slices into some poor designer. In the movie theatre I was in anyway they gave their hearts instead to her second-in-command  Grace Coddington who is the film's real beauty.Coddington was  breathtaking in her younger days, before her 20 years at American Vogue and her 20 years at British Vogue - during the 1960s in other words when she herself worked as fashion model – until a car accident so twisted her face that even now after many surgeries she has a sort sewn-together, around the left eye especially.Anyone can see that she makes no effort to follow in Anna’s footsteps in that she doesn’t seem to “try.” Tall as she is, and reasonably trim, she makes no effort at looking fashionable. Her hair is wild and she has no eyebrows. She wears no makeup, her clothes are baggy and her shoes look like Susan B. Anthony’s –  yet the audience loves her because she seems so kind, and real.Think what this may mean as you click on the trailer here and ask yourself: Are we choosing the inner kind of beauty over the outer kind at long last? Is that great baby Western culture finally learning to stand up in its playpen? Stay tuned!  And when you get the chance go see The September Issue at a theatre near you.This is Grace Coddington young: Grace today, all kindness and humor: