Directed by R. J. Cutler

The September Issue of Vogue is one of the mightiest canons of the fashion world, but you don't need to be a fashion aficionado to enjoy this documentary about its coming together. In fact those ‘who feel excluded from the cool crowd' , which is editor Anna Wintour's definition of people who aren't interested in fashion, may take more glee from its portrayal of a not so hip or romantic or - yes - cool world as we may have expected.

It's ice dragon Anna, recently fictionally portrayed by Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, that we expect to be the focus, but surprisingly, strong woman though she is, it's not her personality that captures the interest here, but that of her old friend, colleague, and adversary, Grace Coddington, the magazine's creative director. Both British, both with a modelling past in the swinging 60s London, they couldn't be more different. Anna's all elegance, smart little suits on her well-honed, narrow body, immaculate make-up, blondish Brooksian bob and often big big dark glasses to hide her face and feelings. And curiously dull. Grace, wild tawny hair framing a face not afraid to show its age, expressive of dry humour, bitterness, exasperation, and the occasional flash of real pleasure, wears shapeless black garb and flat shoes as she pegs doggedly along the office and studio corridors, becoming more witch-like as the film, and her frustrations, progress. It is she who seems to be the real creative force behind the style and content of each issue. And it's mostly her pictures and vision, despite her fears, that in the end make up the meat of the magazine, in a low key adversarial combat between the two that one suspects is to each of them a paradoxically comfortably familiar pattern.

Perhaps it shouldn't be so surprising how banal this world and its vision often is, with clothes often advocated on the basis of being ‘pretty'. Grace may show a more profound aesthetic with her stunning photos on the theme of the 20s, based on Brassai photographs of Paris bar and street scenes, but she has a job on stopping the production people from sharpening up to their contemporary standards the dreamy mood of the images she's gone to great lengths to reproduce.

Neither is there much flamboyance here, with the amusing exception of Andre Leon Talley, a huge sweet-talking black guy who seems to wear several amorphous layers of clothing of varied textures, usually including leather and/or fur, and even plays desultory, practically immobile, tennis for the good of his health (as advised by Anna), with a big thick brown Louis Vuitton towel-cum-wrap thing around his neck. Quite what his role at the magazine is remains unclear. Otherwise it's pretty workaday scene, even the dresses waiting to be donned for shoots look like the sale rack in TKMaxx. There's excitement when Sienna Miller arrives for the celebrity shoot, but more on the part of Sienna and her chum than the magazine gurus. Not only is her hair a mess, in that shapeless in-between look, as she's growing it, tut! - so that means a wig - but the comment scrawled across the portrait eventually chosen for the cover reads ‘TEETH!!', and some canny airbrushing is duly employed.

The foot soldiers of fashion - models, photographers, fixers of various kinds, are surprisingly warm, normal human beings, and don't seem to take the stuff seriously. And goodness what an amount of jumping modelling involves (no wonder models don't have breasts), to give that vibrant, these-clothes-are- so-damned-exciting look. The jumping takes an interesting turn when Grace photographs the film cameraman jumping up in tandem with a model to film her in motion. A stunning picture, but all dull old Anna can do is point to the most infinitesimal slope of gut revealed on him and say he needs to go to the gym. What a grim world she does inhabit, and as, in another scene, we see her cocooned inside a darkened limo going off to some event, the camera appears to focus on her glittering necklace, it in fact reveals in close up the crepey neck below the immaculate face, a vulnerability beyond her control. But also a moment of cruel satisfaction for all those lumpy, wrinkly, uncool folk watching.