Grace by Grace Coddington – review

In 2007, a documentary team began filming The September Issue, a behind-the-scenes look at American Vogue as staff put together the magazine's fattest number of the year under the direction of Anna Wintour, its somewhat scary editor. Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada, a novel in which a woman not unlike Wintour is portrayed as a demanding monster by a former assistant, Wintour's fame preceded her; the film-makers must have thought she would be their star. In the end, though, this is not what happened. When the film was released in 2009, it was clear that the camera had loved a different creature, a pale and tetchy redhead called Grace Coddington, who is Vogue's creative director.

Coddington thinks there was far too much of her in the film, and she suspects her boss felt the same way. But it made her, in New York at least, quite famous, and this she likes. At her local nail salon, for instance, where the staff are Korean, they can't get enough of her. "They love me," she writes, in her memoir. "'Glace! Glace!' they shout when I walk in. They used to like sitting me near the window so passersby could see me. Pedestrians often came up to the glass. When they realised I couldn't hear them, they mouthed things at me like, 'I love The September Issue. I love your work.'" Even better, she was asked to write the story of her life – which was surprising, "given that I've rarely read two books in my life that aren't picture books". To help her out with this commission, she enlisted the help of her friend, Michael Roberts, the famously waspish style director of Vanity Fair.

The model for Grace is surely DV by Diana Vreeland, who was editor-in-chief of American Vogue in the 1960s. But where that book was narrated by a woman long retired, and free to say whatever she liked – in DV's opening paragraph, Vreeland merrily describes punching the agent Swifty Lazar on the nose – Coddington is at the heart of the fashion establishment, and must therefore be discreet; one gathers that even now she still dreads losing her job. Anyone hoping to find out what she really thinks about Galliano, Lagerfeld et al is, then, going to be disappointed – unless (terrifying thought) she really does think that everyone in fashion is clever and funny and generally adorable. Names are dropped rather than unpacked; fashion is described not deconstructed. The moments when she is critical – it is, for instance, just a little trying when, at a shoot on her English estate, Madonna refuses to wear a hat that looks like a cream cake – are so wildly rare, they jump out at you like Paris couture on a rail of Primark nylon.

Coddington was born in 1941 on Anglesey, Wales, where her parents ran a hunkered, whitewashed hotel. This is the best bit of the book, for she evokes island life quite beautifully: the cold, the longing for trees, the patterns she used to buy from Polykoff's, an old department store in Holyhead. With nothing much else to do, she took the fantasy world of Vogue to heart, and it was from among its pages that, aged 18, she clipped a tiny paragraph advertising, for the price of 25 guineas, a two-week course at the Cherry Marshall modelling school in Mayfair. "I knew I must leave my tiny island," she writes. Those who stayed had only two choices, career-wise: clock factory or snack bar.

In London, she worked as a waitress at the Stockpot and waited for her ship to come in. Happily, it wasn't long. Soon after graduating from Cherry Marshall, Coddington won a Vogue modelling competition, and was suddenly in demand. She was photographed by Norman Parkinson, had her hair cut by Vidal Sassoon, and was duly awarded a nickname: the Cod. It wasn't as pretty as Jean Shrimpton's, but somehow it stuck. "Cold as a codfish but hot as a four-bar fire" proclaimed a baffling headline in the Daily Sketch. By the time she began work as a stylist at Vogue in 1968, she had kissed Mick Jagger, spilt wine over Catherine Deneuve's white Courrèges dress, and was dating the man who would become her first husband, the restaurateur Michael Chow. (Her second marriage, which lasted six months, was to the photographer Willie Christie; she now lives with her boyfriend of 30 years, the hairdresser Didier Malige.)

It's at this point that all the heat goes out of her book. In life, I admire emotional reticence. But there's really no point in writing a memoir if you're not going to give anything away. It's also disconcerting, to say the least, to find grave events – the car accident in which she lost the only child she was ever able to conceive; the breakdown and early death of her sister, whose son Coddington later adopted – passed over in two cool sentences, when she is willing to devote several pages to her favourite models, and a whole chapter to her cats. Boy, is she keen on cats. Forget shoes. Forget bags. Forget sunglasses. (Actually, she hates sunglasses.) Grace is "cat central". In New York, people are always asking for the number of her cat psychic: "She's brilliant, by the way. I was introduced to her by Bruce Weber."

Coddington hated The Devil Wears Prada: "I thought it made our business look laughable." Alas, she's pretty good at doing this herself – and I don't just mean the cats. In Normandy, she and a makeup artist spend an hour fruitlessly tipping buckets of dye into the sea, the better to make it blue for the photographer David LaChapelle. A visit to communist China in the late 70s leaves her "appreciating minimalism in new ways". Worst of all, noting that Tina Chow, Michael's second wife, died of Aids in 1992, she writes: "I had no idea up until then that it was even possible for women to contract Aids." Such daffyness – I'm being polite – will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a fashion magazine (though it's surprising that Roberts, her "lifelong friend", didn't intervene; perhaps he is even more waspish than I thought). But I must admit that I expected better from Coddington. That startling forehead of hers, combined with the fact that she has been in the business for so long, contrived to convince me that she might just be the one to point out which of fashion's various emperors are wearing clothes, and which of them are stark bollock naked.