The person getting the most out of the long “The Devil Wears Prada 2” press tour isn’t even in the movie.
It wasn’t the movie’s lead, Meryl Streep, who got to present at the Oscars alongside co-star Anne Hathaway in March. Instead, it was Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor and widely-acknowledged “Devil Wears Prada” subject. Wintour now appears on the cover of her own magazine alongside Streep, in a double portrait that emphasizes, if nothing else, Wintour’s iron will. Through sheer force of personality, she’s turned a film franchise once premised on how bad a place Vogue is to work into a promotional opportunity for Wintour, personally.
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“The Devil Wears Prada,” Part 1, didn’t always seem as if it’d be good for the brand — for Vogue, or, perhaps more importantly, to Wintour. The 2006 film was a lacerating portrait with glimmering moments of humanity; it was based on a novel by a former Wintour assistant, and, though we get to see the wounded creature, and the magazine-making genius, within demonic editor Miranda Priestly, it’s more frequent that she’s making unrealistic demands and behaving with a maddeningly airy dismissiveness. As Streep tells Vogue interviewer Greta Gerwig (why not!), the entire fashion industry “was afraid of Anna on the first one, so we couldn’t find any clothes.” To collaborate with the film was, potentially, to lose access to Vogue forever.
When the film became a hit, though, Wintour embraced it; both Hathaway and Streep have been (alone) on the cover multiple times since its release, for instance. But there’s embracing and then there’s throttling. It should, but evidently does not, go without saying that Wintour was not in fact creatively involved in “The Devil Wears Prada,” except as its inspiration. The Vogue story, perhaps predictably, positions her for a moment as a sort of victim of the project, allowing Wintour to narrate a story of learning that the sequel was being made and calling Streep: “I knew she would tell me if it was going to be all right.” To Wintour’s relief, Streep told her it would be fine. Suffice it to say that it’s an unorthodox marketing strategy for a sequel to a hit satire to have the subject of said satire publicly announce that she’s been reassured it won’t go too hard.
Wintour’s seeming omnipresence on the “Prada” tour is blotting out the potential for the movie; we can’t allow ourselves to disappear into Miranda’s world if Anna is sitting on our shoulder, whispering that it’s okay to laugh, so long as we understand that fashion really is a very important industry that we ought to take seriously. (Every time Streep really starts to get going in the Vogue profile, Wintour stops its momentum dead with reflections on fashion that Wintour-watchers have heard before.) In similar fashion, Wintour is appearing on the cover of a magazine she no longer runs day-to-day; in recently ascending to the perch of global editorial director of Vogue, Wintour spoke publicly about passing the torch to talented and imaginative protege Chloe Malle. But Malle’s Vogue is, at least for this month, Wintour’s Vogue. Or, given how unorthodox it is for an editor of a journalistic entity to place herself as the cover’s photo subject, perhaps it’s Wintour’s O: The Oprah Magazine.
Appearing as the cover subject and sitting for an interview is simply not something Wintour’s great Condé rivals Tina Brown and Graydon Carter might have done. (Carter placed himself on the final fold of his last Vanity Fair “Hollywood” issue, shrouded by shadow, but he didn’t then sit for an interview with cover stars Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman.) Say this much, though: Wintour has become something more than editor. In the years since 2006, Wintour has cannily placed her persona of sunglass-wearing hauteur right up against mass culture, and drawn no small measure of fascination from the public. She goes on late night shows and does candid videos for Vogue’s website, and the contrast between the casual settings and her admirable rectitude generates sparks.
But her star power is of a very particular kind, and it tends to insist upon itself at all costs. Across Condé Nast, the company whose editorial she sits astride, The New Yorker is leading industry coverage of A.I. and GQ has reinvented itself as the journal of 2020s masculinity; in May, a major motion picture led by a 76-year-old leading lady — a septuagenarian summer-movie star who somehow rivals Marvel, and in so doing radically reframes potential for her colleagues. Yet here we are, having the same conversation we’ve been having for 20 years or more, all about Anna.
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