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Truth, it is said, is stranger than fiction. When it comes to AnnaWintour, the fearsome editor-inchief of American Vogue, that is certainly the case.

We all remember The Devil Wears Prada, the movie adaptation of the novel about life at a New York fashion magazine, in which Meryl Streep played the despotic editor who reduced her staff to jelly, tears and, occasionally, nervous breakdowns. Written by Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger, everybody thought it was based on her old boss, who has been at the helm of the magazine since 1988. But nobody really believed that it was a true depiction of her. Surely Wintour – or Nuclear Wintour, as she is sometimes known – wasn’t that bad? Surely Streep’s character was just a gross Hollywood exaggeration?

It would seem not. For Wintour, 59, has taken the unusual step of allowing cameras to film a documentary about the magazine. The result is The September Issue, a riveting film that makes The Devil Wears Prada look like an episode of The Care Bears.

The cameras follow Britishborn Wintour and her army of editors for much of 2007, as they create the biggest edition of the fashion year (the September issue, which that year had 840 pages, 727 of which were adverts).

Until this week, when it premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, only a handful of fashion insiders had been allowed to watch the 88-minute documentary. All had been sworn to secrecy. For months, the internet has been awash with speculation about the documentary, which earned director RJ Cutler a grand jury nomination at this year’s Sundance festival.

It follows Wintour, OBE, around the shows – she famously once had Milan fashion week moved to fit into her schedule – and proves that she doesn’t just run a magazine: she runs all of fashion. When she meets the head designer at Yves Saint Laurent – a man we must

Anna Wintour in The September Issue and (right) the September 2008 issue, the creation of which is captured in the film

presume to be reasonably powerful – she is disparaging enough of his collection for him to rethink it; she has no qualms in asking Prada to “reinterpret” some of its designs. She does all this in her giant dark sunglasses, precision-bobbed hair and Chanel suit, a look that has not changed for years. Wintour may influence fashion, but she clearly considers herself to be above it.

Anna – or Ahhnna, as her staff refer to her – does not talk very much. There are only a few occasions when she speaks directly to camera; her permanent poker face says more about her than she ever could (tellingly, she admits in her transatlantic drawl that she admired her father, Charles, a former editor of the London Evening Standard, because he was “inscrutable”).

She throws out a shoot that cost $50,000 because she doesn’t like it. When a stylist asks why the pictures of a

model in a rubber outfit have been removed from a story about “texture”, the art director replies that for Anna rubber is not a texture. Another staff member picks out a jacket from a rail and wonders out loud if her boss would like it, before saying: “No, of course she won’t. It’s black. Icould get fired for that.”

“It’s like belonging to a church,” says Candy Pratts Price, who runs the Vogue website.

“And Anna is the high priestess?” asks the director.

“I would say she is more like the Pope.”

Despite Wintour’s dominating presence in the Vogue offices, she is surrounded by colourful characters. There is André Leon Talley, her portly editorat-large, who plays tennis in top-to-toe Louis Vuitton and bemoans “a famine of beauty”.

Then there is Grace Coddington, a former model,

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also from Britain, who started at the magazine the same day as Wintour and is now her number two. With wild red hair and not a scrap of make-up on her face, Coddington and Wintour could not be more different. Their relationship is intriguing. Coddington is perhaps the only person who stands up to Wintour – when one designer meets her his

hands are shaking – and Wintour clearly respects her for that. At the end of the film, she concedes that she could not live without Coddington.

The September Issue must be the only film in which Sienna Miller is reduced to a bit part. As a Hollywood A-lister and the magazine’s cover girl, you might think that the staff of Vogue would treat her with appropriate reverence, but, instead, Wintour complains that her hair is “lacklustre”, that she is too “toothy” and that you can see her fillings in the pictures.

So how on earth did director RJ Cutler get Wintour to agree to be filmed? “This will come as a shock to you,” says Cutler, “but all I had to do was ask.” Cutler produced The War Room, the 1993 documentary about Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. Who was more frightening? Neither, he says. Did she like it? “It would be fair to say that she would have made a different film to the one I did.” Did she meddle? “Of course, she did – she’s Anna Wintour. But at Sundance she said: ‘I made many suggestions to RJ – but let’s face it, it’s his film.’ Irespect her for that.”

They are still in touch. “She is astounding really,” says Cutler. “She is like a historical figure who walks among us. I always explain her this way: you can make a film without Steven Spielberg’s blessing, you can produce some software without Bill Gates’s blessing, but you can’t get into fashion without Anna Wintour’s blessing.”

Some have suggested that this may be Wintour’s last year as editor-in-chief at AmericanVogue; The September Issue would certainly serve as a supreme act of selfcommemoration. But, for a documentary about fashion, it has a surprising poignancy.

On the surface, Wintour may seem ice cool, but her demeanour is underpinned by insecurity. She says: “People are frightened of fashion – because it scares them, they put it down. They mock it because they are not part of it.” Her siblings all have serious jobs – one brother is the political editor of the Guardian – and she thinks that they are “very amused by what I do”. She looks pretty grim-faced as she says this.

At one point, we meet her charming daughter, Bee, who wants to be a lawyer, despite her mother’s keenness that she become an editor. “Some of the people in there [the Vogue office] act as if fashion is life,” says Bee to the camera. “And I know that it is really fun, and amusing. But there are other things out there.”

Deep down, her mother would probably agree.