In the trailer for the new documentary The September Issue, Vogue Editor in Chief Anna Wintour says, “There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous.”

Um, yeah … There is something about Anna Wintour that can make people very nervous.

I discovered that firsthand when I began attending New York Fashion Week in 1999 and, at my editor’s insistence, regularly approached Wintour’s front-row perch — and dodged her bodyguards — to interview her.

It always meant overcoming the squirmy feeling that she’d rather barricade herself inside a Kmart dressing room than talk to me.

There was the time I asked how she planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve.

Her clipped answer: “I intend to be at home with my children, watching TV and wearing Gap.”

There was the time I asked her about attending Donald Trump’s Palm Beach wedding.

“I had a deeply embarrassing experience,” she said. “I sat one seat away from a girl who was in the identical dress. … I told her she had very good taste.”

There were the eyes-averted, two-word answers when I asked her that standard-issue fashion question: Who are you wearing?

And there was the unfortunate time I knelt in front of her (literally knelt — that’s what made it all the more humiliating) and asked, “What is style?”

Insert derisive cackle here.

“Oh, that’s a silly question,” she said. “Everyone always asks that. You need to think of something more original.”

I stammered something about how my boss had put me up to this …

“That’s my answer,” said Wintour, her eyes already scanning the room for someone more interesting. “Think of a more original question.”

Well, at least I tried.

If Fashion Week is high school with more money, better clothes and meaner girls, then Wintour is the über-Heather, the Prada-clad queen beeyatch in a status-obsessed subculture where the pecking order is always on display.

Celebs and magazine editors sit in the front row. Newspaper editors sit in the fifth, the equivalent of the school cafeteria’s table du dorks.

And most of my colleagues in the back row were just fine with that.

“I’d rather be in Row 5 than near (Wintour) any day!” said a West Coast fashion editor. “Just standing in her vicinity is humiliation enough, isn’t it?

“She’s teeny and perfectly coiffed and looks at everyone as if they are ants that need to be squished.”
People tend to pick up on that.

As 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer said in his profile of her, she “bears a look that says, ‘I’m the boss. And you’re boring.’ ”

David Letterman recently invited Wintour to the Late Show to promote The September Issue, in which filmmakers followed the Vogue staff as they put together the September 2007 issue, the thickest in the magazine’s history. The movie opens in Palm Beach County today.

Letterman asked Wintour about her reputation as a tough boss, and she told him, “I’m very decisive … and sometimes unfortunately (people) don’t hear the answer that they would like to hear.”

So, “think of a more original question” wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

But she was right. It was unoriginal. Just flip through the current September issue of Vogue …

There it is on Page 340 (“What is personal style? ‘It’s your life experiences … expressed through your clothes.’ ”) and again on Page 463 (“Style, as we sometimes forget, is really about fun, plain and simple.”)
Wintour’s father was a demanding London newspaper editor who struck fear in the hearts of his reporters, and Wintour told 60 Minutes she learned early on that “people respond well to someone who’s sure of what they want.”

They sure do. In recent seasons, my response to Wintour has been to approach her only on an as-needed basis.

After all, dispensing the naked truth is her style, plain and simple.