So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 110) Who's in the mood for a September Issue?

Hello! Welcome to a newsletter fit for three-day-weekend reading and easing gently into a new month and a new grind of back-to-school activities and/or bosses who are all, "Our fiscal year ends in three weeks. Let us commence panicking NOW."

So ... what have you been up to? Dish via email or Twitter.

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Your pop-culture note has taken over the newsletter: THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE

The turning of the (retail) seasons means September style magazine issues that can double as doorstops. This particular genre is going through a massive transition at the moment, so let's ignore the thrashing about as these publications attempt to figure out what The Youngs want ("Vocal fry? Is that a band? Is that why people won't shut up about it?"). Here's what to read or watch instead.

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The All-Diana Vreeland Curriculum: I have already talked about my love of D.V. by Diana Vreeland (with a generous assist by George Plimption) in vol 2, issue 20, and about the fabulousness of the movie The Eye Has to Travel (vol 2, issue 47).

To that, I will suggest you pick up a copy of Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland, which is just what you want in a biography: Plenty of facts, a soupcon of dishy gossip, and a well-sourced framing device to explain why this person mattered and what their legacy is.

And then go follow this Twitter account, which beautifully delivers on its concept: "Why don't you ... create a tribute/parody Twitter account for the greatest fashion editor who ever lived?"

(The real "Why Don't You ..." suggestions are worth revisiting for their blend of attainability and pure fantasy, and there's a whole book of them. Vreeland thought in tweets 80 years before the platform was invented.)

Finally, watch Kay Thompson's echt-Vreeland turn in Funny Face. The "Think Pink" number is magnificent.

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The dream of the Nineties is alive: The documentary Unzipped (streaming on Netflix or rent it from iTunes), about Isaac Mizrahi creating and showing his fall 1995 collection, is a delight because it's filled with pretty people and prettier clothes, and because it's such a perfect snapshot of the last moments in pre-Internet America. Looking back at it 20 years later, it's striking to see what's changed about everyday life. The documentary reminds me of what Kim France wrote about MTV's House of Style revival:

Some things seem so completely and excellently of their era that they seem best left there ... The show’s appeal was all about the fact that it exposed insidery, indie-ish culture to everyone, anywhere across the country who cared to tune in. And two decades later, we live in a world where the blogosphere and Twitter and Pinterest and whatever comes next have rendered that particular task redundant.

Speaking of Kim France -- which we will be doing more of ASAP -- move into 1990s Sassy, more specifically through Marisa Melzer's How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time.

Then dig into the creative DNA behind Sassy -- which would give rise to Lucky -- via former Sassy/Lucky force-of-nature Andrea Linnett's I Want to Be Her: How Friends and Strangers Shaped My Style. This is basically a memoir via outfits, where Linnett captures the giddy excitement of trying on different identities and the pleasure we get from beholding people who are unequivocally themselves. Linnett runs a site of the same name, and you can subscribe to her posts via email or RSS feed.

Kim France (also formerly of Sassy, also formerly of Lucky, which she launched and ran for a decade) now runs a one-woman operation called Girls of a Certain Age, which is basically like getting front-of-the-book magazine features daily. You can subscribe via email or RSS feed.

Finally -- and I recommend this all the time but I will not rest until we've all read it -- wrap up the decade and put it away with Teri Agins' The End of Fashion, which reported on the shifts in dressing that would reverberate across retail for the next two decades.

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The Conde Nast capsule collection: The gold standard here is, of course, the documentary The September Issue (available for rental on iTunes). It appeals to me because it is deeply satisfying to watch creative people excel at what they do, and the scene where Andre Leon Talley plays tennis tops anything that ever appeared on Absolutely Fabulous.

After that, go hunt down In Vogue: The Editor's Eye, which is a 59-minute festival of lunacy: it's like Zoolander filtered through the aesthetic of the Emma Willard school multiplied by an Inspector Closeau accent. Hearing Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele hold forth on how much she hates grunge is worth the subtitles. (Amy Odell's review for Buzzfeed is hilarious and spot-on.)

Then, since you will have watched a lot of footage of Grace Coddington as The Irresistible Force (up against Anna Wintour's Immovable Object), you'll want to read Grace: A Memoir, which is as much about a time and place in fashion history as it is about Coddington herself. Her description of British Vogue in the early 1980s could double as any scene in Absolutely Fabulous where Patsy had to go to the office (as a British Vogue editor, natch).

Then rocket into mass-market modernity by reading Jean Godfrey-June's book Free Gift With Purchase: My Improbable Career in Magazines and Makeup. Godfrey-June was the former beauty editor at Lucky for a billion years and I am not the only one who flipped to her column first thing every month, if the ecstatic reaction to her byline in The Cut is any indication. Godfrey-June drops chill personal-philosophy tidbits like "Marriage is a crapshoot" in between dishy gossip about 1990s-era Elle magazine.

Bonus viewing: Over on Netflix, you can watch the documentary Mademoiselle C, which is about deposed Vogue Paris editor Carine Roitfeld and her next act, which was to launch her own publication CR Fashion Book. It's similar to Unzipped or The September Issue in the way the director shows the occasionally tedious, detail-oriented grind of creative work while also attempting to build up a cult of personality around their subject. Only it has the bonus of watching Karl Lagerfeld act like a daffy Deutsch uncle whenever confronted with a small child.

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And as a final palate cleanser, go check out the amazing photographic series fashion stylist Nathalie Croquet did. She recreated fashion shoots using herself as the star -- and it's a visual education in fantasy and marketing. That's something to keep in mind if you do decide to dive into the September issues after all these tours behind the scenes.

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YOUR SEPTEMBER FOOTER: Here's a free and easy way to show people you like them -- send them here to subscribe to So What, Who Cares? You can plumb the archives here. You can always reach out to me via Twitter or email. You can be my bodyguard, and I can be your long-lost pal. I can call you Betty, and Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.