blow-up.

Byline: Anna Wintour

Making the September issue-our most elaborate, most fashion-filled, and this year our biggest ever-is like making a movie. It requires advance planning, location scouting, casting, wardrobe, art direction, set decoration, and a high-budget collaboration involving wordsmiths, visual maestros, editors, not to mention a talented legion of assistants and extras. But most crucially, it requires ideas.

At Vogue, our September dreaming begins almost a year beforehand, when our Creative Director, Grace Coddington, starts coming into my office with fantastical fashion narratives. Steven Meisel's about Jazz Age-inspired fashion, for example, began with Coddington's entirely private urge to bring Brassai and a certain cinematic romance into the magazine. Then, at the fall collections shown in February and March, we saw twenties clothes-loads of them, in fact-and a way of bringing her vision to light. Likewise, Steven Klein's menswear-inspired fashion story originated in Fashion Director Tonne Goodman's longstanding interest in green technology: The fashion content came afterward.

A key meeting, as regards fashion, was, as usual, our breakfast during the Paris collections with the team from Neiman Marcus to discuss trends. It always crystallizes our thinking-and is followed by Fashion Market Director Virginia Smith's supremely useful Vogue.com look book-and helps us connect runway with reality. This fall, things moved toward the more severe and grown-up, a shift we've tackled head-on in our View section. But there's also a lot of fun to be had-with textures and fringe and plumage. It's a great season to dress up, even if that only means adding a bright shoe or a bold brooch.

The whole process of bringing out the September issue is a thrilling and slightly hair-raising business-and attracted the attention of R. J. Cutler, the maker of documentaries such as The War Room. He and a small crew (Bob Richman, Eddie O'Connor, Sadia Shepard, and Lauren Sherman) have been filming our every move (it seems) since January. They even make cameo appearances in Patrick Demarchelier and Grace Coddington's "Brights! Camera! Action!" Just as the ever-present Bob and Eddie grew increasingly fearless as they slipped through our world of fittings, run-throughs, shows, and endless meetings, so we at Vogue became increasingly confident ...