Afternoon:
10°c
I went off to see The September Issue with a heavy heart, having sat through too many films purporting either to "lift the lid" on the fashion industry or "capture its unique and fascinating essence", only to have them turn out to be marginally less exciting than watching matte black paint dry.
The Devil Wears Prada (2006) was woeful; Unzipped (1994) was vacuous and Brüno (2009) made me want to poke myself in the eye with the nearest Louboutin.
Even the great Robert Altman failed spectacularly to capture the fashion world in 1994's Prêt-à-Porter, despite his reputation as an all-seeing eye.
The most accurate portrayal of fashion's egos and eccentrics is probably Zoo-lander (2001), Ben Stiller's parody of a self-obsessed model with a pose called Blue Steel.
The fashion world is beyond parody, but the ridiculousness of Derek Zoolander comes pretty close.
Being beyond parody, the best way to capture planet fashion is via the medium of straight documentary: tell it like it is.
This is what director R Cutler set out to do with The September Issue, and why he succeeds where so many other treatments failed.
I loved the film: it made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me want to marry Grace Coddington.
While much has already been written about Anna Wintour, American Vogue's redoubtable editrix, she is not the star of the film.
That accolade belongs to Coddington, Wintour's long-suffering fashion director and the film's very heart and soul.
Every organisation has a boss like Anna, and every organisation has a maverick like Grace: the tension between the practical and the creative, the ordered and the chaotic, is essential for a good magazine.
What is surprising is not so much Coddington's creative talent, still raw and vulnerable after all these years, but Wintour's apparent envy of it.
For all her power and influence, you sense that Wintour would rather be creating the perfect image than editing the perfect mag.
Oh my God, I thought, stumbling from the auditorium in a daze; Anna doesn't like herself.
She's just like the rest of us, wishing we were someone else. Then the moment passed, and I decided she had played me like a fiddle.
Someone as calculated as Wintour wouldn't let her self-doubt be committed to celluloid so carelessly... would she?
For anyone, creative or otherwise, who feels their integrity has been stomped on by endless rounds of cost-cutting, The September Issue will strike a chord, although London's nurses might justifiably want to set a match to the whole American Vogue office.
As a window into the fashion world, it is brilliant, but the film has a currency beyond the world it set out to capture.
What it crystallises is a golden age, pre-recession, pre-budget cuts, pre-swingeing unemployment, where all that mattered was the product: its excellence, rather than its cost.
Grace Coddington is a timely reminder that while there may be truth in numbers, there is no beauty. Go be transported by a film about a magazine created before accountants ruled the world.
Priced into a very entertaining bargain
They say there is someone for everyone. Just as I was beginning to doubt that there was anyone on God's green earth who could possibly be vile, nasty and selfish enough for Katie Price, the following words of wisdom fall like pearls from the mouth of Alex Reid, the cage fighter and erstwhile porn star who is currently her boyfriend.
"I wasn't even aware of how much being with Katie could help me. And it has. My stock's gone right up," quoth Alex, a specimen of humanity whose stock couldn't really go down.
"I can't look a gift horse in the mouth. Because of our relationship, a lot of doors are going to open."
Like the one marked "exit", if Katie has any sense - which, happily for us, she hasn't. This pantomime will run and run - gift horse and all.
• It's funny how you can ignore what's on your own doorstep. For 10 years, I've worked in an office that is a hop, skip and a jump from Holland Park, and yet I hadn't set foot in it since about 1991 - until last night, when I took my daughter to its open air theatre to watch the English National Ballet perform Angelina's Star Turn (the things you do for love, etc).
Heartening to see that metrosexuality blossoms in London at such a young age: I was surprised to see as many little boys in the audience as girls, all pirouetting in the aisles with the same alacrity as their sisters.
Half an hour into the performance, my daughter turned to me and whispered: "Mummy, when will Angelina start talking?" Hmm - maybe we'll bench the ballet for a while.
No longer a man's game... but who let Lily in?
The Lily-isation of modern Britain grows apace. Nice girl and all that, but listening to her prattle on during Test Match Special was a bridge too far for my poor husband, who switched it off in despair.
He likes the cricket because it is a chance to get away from what blogger Perez Hilton calls "the celebutards": whatever is happening down the Groucho, in Test Match Land, it is forever 1963 - a sentiment that makes me dearly wish I liked cricket.
Anyway. Surely the real travesty isn't the fuss accorded to Lily Allen's cricket tweets, but the complete lack of fuss accorded to the England women's cricket team, which not only won the women's Ashes this year, but also the ICC World Twenty20, as well as the World Cup.
I'm no cricket expert, but isn't this hat-trick of achievements a little more worthy of blanket media coverage than whether Lily Allen fancies Stuart Broad?
