Anna Wintour has seemed cozier with The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the last couple of months than she was with bestie Baz Luhrmann on the front row of Vogue World: Hollywood. 

When I saw the movie at a New York screening last week, I suspected it would be full of industry cameos, possibly even AW herself. However, while the movie runneth over with famous fashion and publishing figures, she was never asked, director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna told me in an interview Friday for the Back Row podcast. (Owing to heavy spoilers, our full interview will be released after the movie comes out on May 1.)

“That felt too meta to us to put her in the movie,” said Frankel.

That said, she did visit the set when they were filming a scene that took place at the Dior offices where Emily works. Anna took a photo with the cast, and Frankel filmed a gag take of Anna that he said will come out as an extra when the movie hits streaming platforms. “Unfortunately, Anna jumped her cue, so the shot isn't always in focus. And I didn't want to do a second take. I can't ask Anna to do take two,” he said.

Brosh McKenna found herself standing near the monitor with Anna, who has long been famously opinionated about floral arrangements. Anna told her that the shot wasn’t right. There were too many flowers. What’s more, their pink color was all wrong.

Dior would only have white.  

“I came running out and I was like, ‘Dude, kill the flowers,’” said Brosh McKenna. The prop team replaced the display with a single vase of white flowers.

Brosh McKenna and Frankel had only high praise for Anna. “The movie is celebrating fashion. And so many people have been inspired to work in fashion and in media because of the movie. And she appreciates that,” said Frankel. “To me, both movies are a celebration of her ambition for excellence."

The Miranda Priestly character in Lauren Weisberger’s book was obviously based on Anna, but Brosh McKenna maintains that that character wasn’t her version of Anna Wintour when the first movie came out in 2006. “It would be like, What? You're doing a really specific homage to someone most people don't know. Now, obviously, she's much more famous, but it's not interesting [to me] to do a direct one-to-one on anybody,” she said. “And so that's not ever how I see it. I see her as Meryl's Miranda.” 

Brosh McKenna said she never intended to write a "takedown" of Anna Wintour. While I believe her, the source material is inescapable. In his review of the first movie, Roger Ebert called Miranda Priestly "a cross between Anna Wintour, Graydon Carter and a dominatrix." The New York Times's A.O. Scott wrote in his review at the time that Frankel and Brosh McKenna "know how to mock without sneering, and how to acknowledge that fashion is a serious business without taking it too seriously."

Reviewers also noted that Anna and Condé Nast barely acknowledged the first film. When it was coming together, the fashion industry seemed mostly terrified to get involved. (Though that didn’t stop the filmmakers from getting Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum, and Valentino Garavani to do cameos.)

Now that Anna has embraced the sequel, some are wondering if the film has gotten so cozy with the fashion industry that it won't be able to poke fun at it the way it did in 2006.

Brosh McKenna argued that the sequel is “in many ways more pointed, because these businesses have been turned upside down and shaking the change out of their pockets.” She added, “We are, too, in our business trying to figure out how to make money. What do you do when advertising goes away, or people stop reading magazines? So in many ways, the world around these characters has become even more ridiculous. And so the lens on fashion, publishing, journalism… There's such a cynicism now to how these things are, how they have to be monetized.”

I don’t want to spoil the movie, but the portrayal of the publishing industry felt depressingly accurate. Magazine publishing has become so absurd now that it’s not hard to make entertainment out of it.

I’ll be curious to see how audiences react to Meryl’s Miranda this time around. I welcome your thoughts and predictions in the comments!

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