After a recent trip to a southern city where no one wears fleece, I took a moment to reflect upon my Maine mud season couture. (This involved a certain amount of sighing.)

Things have gone downhill since I worked in public relations at a Boston hospital, when I dressed up every day. Now I work at home and mostly wear jeans. Style—if you could call it that—is subdued in Maine. I suppose this is due to practicality, puritanism, and an emphasis on the natural.

But after this awful winter and experiencing New Orleans’ blessed over-the-topness, I wanted to be—dare I say it—girly. I bought nail polish and rented 2009’s The September Issue, a documentary about Vogue magazine and the creation of the most important issue of the year, which introduces the fall fashion season.

In a rather snarky review, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times posited that the movie has “little to say about fashion, the real ins and outs of publishing or the inner workings and demons of the magazine’s notoriously demanding meanie in chief…this entertaining, glib movie…is really all about money.”

My perspective out here in the hinterlands is different. To me, The September Issue is about beauty, play, and work—as well as isolation and community.

“Formidable” is the cliché used to describe the protagonist, Editor Anna Wintour, who is indeed often unsmiling and intimidating, especially with younger, inexperienced staff. Wintour’s unerring, confident vision is evident as she whips through photo layouts as the issue progresses, unhesitatingly tossing aside ideas that have taken months of work and a lot of money.

Of course this is heartbreaking for her colleagues, because the photo layouts are built on storytelling, something I never paid much attention to until I saw this film. One spread of insanely expensive clothes might be based on a classic Cartier Bresson photograph, another on Lady Gaga, with sensibilities and narratives to match.

The September Issue also introduces us to Creative Director Grace Coddington, who is responsible for most layouts, as well as the surprisingly unglamorous cast of characters who work unstintingly to put together the magazine. Coddington is late sixtyish, with a long mane of dyed red hair, which takes some getting used to, juxtaposed as it is against her unadorned, weathered skin. She’s tough, funny, and moving, as when she travels to Versailles for one of Vogue’s baroque photo shoots.

“Beautiful,” she sighs, staring out at the formal gardens, looking young.

Without her sunglasses in her informal, almost shabby townhouse, Wintour seems vulnerable, particularly when she’s with her grown daughter, who laughs that she finds the fashion world ridiculous (she wants to go to law school). When Wintour mentions that her three adult siblings consider her work “amusing,” the camera lingers on her soft face. For a moment, I pitied her— bone-thin, driven to cultivate mystique and yet devalued by those who should care for her most.

The movie is full of paradox. During its course, we discover that almost all its protagonists, including Wintour, left parochial environments behind to join the rarified world of fashion. They are outsiders—work-obsessed women who are middle-aged and look it, flamboyant gay men, and garishly made up young models. The sumptuous luxury of fashion contrasts with the shockingly unadorned ateliers, workrooms and offices that are back stages for Fashion Weeks in New York and Paris.

The September Issue’s eccentric landscape reminds me of the theatrical “little world” of the Ekdahl family in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. While equally seductive, the Ekdahl’s world is also full of imperfection and marginalized creatures—in Fanny and Alexander’s case, lechers, self-pitying failures, solipsists.

But it also encompasses pleasure—its humanistic vision, in a departure for Bergman, keeping the tragedy and brutality of the larger world at bay.

The September Issue is not that sanguine. The lonely ending echoes its beginning—a Town Car bringing Wintour back to a scruffy New York street, not a joyous family celebration. As always, Wintour is hidden behind her sunglasses. I imagine she is wearing a cross around her neck, as she and Coddington, interestingly, do in almost every scene in the film.

Maybe that’s what helps them create Vogue’s elaborate, senseless beauty, a flash of light brilliant against the dark.