In the opening moments of "The September Issue," there's an extreme close-up of a woman with catlike green eyes who begins to speak in a carefully modulated British accent -- and suddenly, you think, "Aha, so that's what Anna Wintour looks like!"

What -- you were expecting her to wear sunglasses in her own documentary?

Actually, the fabled, feared Wintour does don her trademark Jackie O shades in R.J. Cutler's 90-minute film, which opened Friday at Squirrel Hill Theater and the new Cinemark in Robinson. "The September Issue," about her and Vogue, the iconic fashion magazine, didn't arrive here until October.

Named for the magazine's biggest issue of the year, the film is a lot of fun to watch, at least if you have any interest in fashion or how Vogue is put together (with a lot of long days and a lot of last-minute reshoots, apparently) or, for that matter, if you're intrigued with Wintour, the singularly powerful editor in chief famously portrayed on the big screen by Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada."

While Streep's icy send-up was dead-on, the real thing is, as usual, far more interesting. Supremely self-possessed, the wintry Wintour shows flashes of warmth in scenes with Thakoon Panichgul, the young designer she mentors, but in her world, every assistant, every designer, every photographer, indeed, every DAY, it seems, is a disappointment. So much falls short of her expectations: "Is that it?" is a favorite reaction to a photograph or a dress or a hairstyle that she delivers with no discernible emotion, just a kind of flat terseness.

Devastating and -- for a documentary purporting to be an "inside" account, sanctioned by Wintour herself -- surprisingly honest.

But for all of "The September Issue's" obvious appeal as entertainment, one question remains mostly unanswered: How does Wintour actually KNOW what fashion is at any given moment, this season or next? How did this daughter of a British journalist become the most powerful person in America's $200 billion fashion and accessories industry?

Certainly, Wintour must know something; the 2007 September issue boasted more ad pages than any in that magazine's history. Or maybe not. This September's issue, like most magazines in Conde Nast's empire, suffered a precipitous drop in advertising.

How does Wintour know that "there's too much black" in a particular photo layout? Or "not enough texture" in a rack of clothes brought to her office for inspection? Where does she get off asking the creative director of Yves St. Laurent why there's not more "evening" or "color" in his collection, prompting poor Stefano Pilati to wring his hands and make weak excuses (it's winter?) in one of the film's truly cringe-worthy scenes.

Holly Brubach, a Pittsburgher who served as style editor for The New York Times, fashion critic for The New Yorker and who worked for Vogue in the 1970s and 1980s, before Wintour came on board, says it may be that Wintour simply possesses good instincts.

But Brubach also believes there may be something Jungian at work in the way fashion design evolves from season to season -- from Dior's New Look to Balenciaga's The Sack to the mini to the maxi to black to plum -- as a result of the famed psychoanalyst's theory of a collective creative "unconscious."

"I don't think there's some conspiracy with editors sitting around a conference table saying, 'Let's all do lime green this year,'??" Brubach said, "but my years in the fashion business convinced me that there are ideas in the air, and that in fashion several people pull them out of the air at the same time. What makes somebody successful in the fashion business is the ability to tap into whatever that collective unconscious is at that moment."

In the film, Wintour and a group of editors do meet around a table with Neiman Marcus Group's CEO (Pittsburgh native Burt Tansky) and tell him that they're going to be pushing jackets ("The jacket is the new coat," says one assistant in an earlier scene, one of the more ludicrous sentences uttered in this film or any other). They also assure him they've "talked" to Miuccia Prada about his concern about fabrics being "too heavy." Tansky, in turn, tells Wintour, with faintly disguised impatience, that the designers take too long to produce the clothes and get them into the stores and that, ahem, someone needs to tell the designers to hurry up and send the stuff along.

It's telling to see how warm and charming Wintour is with Tansky, the powerful retailer who will sell the clothes Wintour features in her magazine. It reinforces her position and power over the designers, whom she treats with far less deference.

Clearly, Wintour is about business, first and foremost, while the film's true heroine, Grace Coddington, Vogue's legendary creative director, is about the clothes, and therein lies the film's central dramatic conflict, the clash between Art (Coddington) and Commerce (Wintour).

To be sure, the two longtime colleagues repeatedly proclaim they "understand" and admire one another, but we root for the wraith-like, flame-haired Coddington to prevail, if for no other reason than because she seems genuinely human, actually capable of expressing emotion. She stays at "The Couture" (industry parlance for the fall and spring fashion shows in Paris) long after the others have left, studying, taking notes, absorbing it all -- and in sensible shoes, no less, compared to Wintour's stilettos.

Angry and hurt when her most brilliant photos are summarily dismissed by Wintour, Coddington soldiers on, and at the film's end, she triumphs. Indeed, if there is any revelation in the film about Vogue's role in interpreting and documenting fashion for its readers, it's through Coddington. Some of her exquisite photo layouts may be a bit over the top for Grand Rapids or, for that matter, Upper St. Clair, but hers is an aesthetic sensibility grounded in art, history, photography, literature -- and life.

Coddington was a top model for some of the greatest photographers of the 1950s and 1960s -- Norman Parkinson, Lord Snowdon and Irving Penn, who died last week. An auto accident ended that career and led her behind the scenes, where she found her true calling as a fashion muse at British Vogue and American Vogue, where she started on the same day as Wintour.

Ultimately, Wintour is the final fashion arbiter, although we are never let into her method, which was probably her intent. Reportedly one reason she allowed Cutler (acclaimed for the Bill Clinton campaign saga "The War Room") to film her was because of rumors that she would be replaced by the younger editor of French Vogue. Perhaps she thought, "I'll make myself an icon, and then Si Newhouse (chairman of Conde Nast Publications, which owns Vogue) will never fire me."

Whether she has successfully held off Newhouse is not clear. The print magazine business is in free fall, and Conde Nast's management has shown it will sacrifice even its most prestigious titles (Gourmet just last week) if necessary.

In fairness, Wintour does provide a few moments of self-reflection. Her accomplished, serious-minded brothers and sisters find what she does "amusing," she says (with a sibling's faintly disguised resentment at not being taken seriously?) and her father, Charles Wintour, was a distinguished journalist who nonetheless quit as editor of a British newspaper because, he told his daughter, "I get too angry." His daughter gets angry, too, and, she adds, if one day she gets too angry, maybe she'll quit.

Such revelations are few and far between, though, carefully parsed out for effect: "I'll let you look at me," Wintour seems to be telling us, "I'll show you how I dote on my daughter -- I'm human! I have feelings! -- but I will not let you truly see me."

In the end, for all of the insider-ness of "The September Issue," we are still left on the outside, wondering how it's all done, what makes one garment in fashion and another not, and why Anna Wintour gets to be the decider of that question. Maybe, though, that's exactly how the calculating, consummate professional editor in chief wanted it to be.

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