Meryl Streep graces the cover of Vogue magazine alongside Anna Wintour ahead of the release of “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” which finds Streep reprising her Oscar-nominated role of fashion magazine boss Miranda Priestly. During their chat, moderated by Greta Gerwig, Wintour brought up Melania Trump, which prompted Streep to call out the first lady.
“I think the most… powerful message that our current first lady sent was in the coat that said ‘I Really Don’t Care, Do U?’ when she was going to see migrant children who were incarcerated,” Streep said of Melania Trump’s controversial outfit worn in June 2018. “All dress is about expressing yourself, but we’re also subject to larger historical and political sweeps of expectation.”
Trump later tried to explain the coat, telling ABC that it “was a kind of message, yes” but “it’s obvious I didn’t wear the jacket for the children, I wore the jacket to go on the plane and off the plane. It was for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. I want to show them I don’t care. You could criticize whatever you want to say. But it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”
Streep pivoted from Trump to talking about female fashion at large, saying: “I’m stunned at how women in power have to have bare arms on television while men are covered in shirts and ties or a suit. There’s an apology built into women. They have to show their smallness. It’s compensatory: The advancements of women in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of this one have been destabilizing. It’s as if women have to say, ‘I’m little. I can’t walk in these shoes. I can’t run. I’m bare, not threatening.’”
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” finds Miranda Priestly navigating the turbulent modern news media, with her print magazine having to keep up the times. That’s where the magazine’s new features editor comes in, who just happens to be Priestly’s former assistant (Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs).
“I was interested in the business part of it, that thing of carrying the weight of many, many people’s jobs, running a big organization, keeping it going somehow,” Streep said. “With this one, I thought, ‘Well, where are they going to go?’ Now that everything’s disintegrating, now that these institutions are being undermined or exploded in a way that who knows what is happening in the world right now—I wondered what they were going to do. And I do think they’ve located something true about the business now.
Head over to Vogue magazine’s website to read Streep’s cover with Wintour in its entirety. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” opens in theaters May 1.