The Devil Wears Prada 2 publicity machine is at full throttle, and Dame Anna Wintour wants us to know that she’s in on the joke.
So in on it, in fact, that she is starring alongside Meryl Streep on the cover of the latest issue of American Vogue. Naturally, they’re both wearing Prada. The tagline? “Seeing Double”.
It’s the first time Wintour has appeared on the cover of the title that she edited for 37 years – although she has featured on a select number of industry title front pages (Ad Week, Interview, The Business of Fashion).
The cover is the most obvious acknowledgement from Wintour that she knows the book, film and sequel are actually all about her.
Last autumn, she handed the day-to-day running of American Vogue to Chloe Malle, now its head of editorial content. That said, Wintour is still the boss – she remains chief content officer of Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue. She would have been closely involved in conceiving her own cover shoot concept.
It represents a marked shift in her behaviour surrounding the publication of The Devil Wears Prada in 2003, a novel by Lauren Weisberger inspired by her time as an assistant to Wintour at Vogue. Wintour distanced herself from the book and the original 2006 hit film that it inspired, claiming not to have seen it.
Now, she admits in the accompanying interview, that she has. “What I liked about the first film is that it showed the world what a huge business fashion is,” she told Vogue. “It’s a true economic force globally, and the first film acknowledged that.
“So much has changed. But I like to think we’re evolving rather than disintegrating. We are still here. We’re all doing our jobs – in different ways and across multiple platforms instead of just one, but how wonderful is that? We’re reaching far more people.”
Twenty years on, Wintour is fully involved in the film’s publicity run, too. In March, she presented the Academy Award for Best Costume Design at the Oscars alongside actress Anne Hathaway, who plays assistant Andy Sachs in the film (for the occasion, both wore florals. In spring. Groundbreaking). Their script nodded to the film and to Wintour’s frosty, exacting image. She called Hathaway “Emily”, as Priestly does to Hathaway’s Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada.
When Hathaway asked: “Anna, just curious, what do you think of my dress tonight?” Wintour turned away and said: “And the nominees for best costume design are…”
In celebrating the Miranda Priestly caricature of the editrix, Wintour is exposing a softer, more humorous side of herself. She may never have a hair out of place, but she’s not afraid to admit that life can be a juggle. Her confidence in expressing this, she said, comes with age.
“I think with experience, you have a sense of balance and proportion, and you know that life is not perfect and that things will go wrong and you’re just going to give it your best shot. But if it doesn’t work, you have to move on,” she told Vogue.
“I feel age is actually an advantage. I was relentless about going to the games and turning up at the parent-teacher meetings, being there when it was important. I felt like Vogue could always wait and that it’s okay to be a busy mother. You make it work.”