What The Devil Wears Prada Got Wrong About Anna Wintour

It’s widely accepted that Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada was based on Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour.

Meryl Streep won an Oscar nomination for playing the intimidating fashion editor – Priestley, not Wintour – who threw her coat at interns and made the world ‘cerulean’ sound like a threat. 

But as uncanny as Miranda was to Anna Wintour, there were apparently a few major differences between Runway and Vogue.  Andre Leon Talley, Wintour’s former BFF and former editor-at-large of Vogue, has pointed out the things that the 2006 movie got wrong, and Wintour would not throw her expensive handbags on a desk.

In an excerpt of his new book The Chiffon Trenches, acquired by People, Talley, 70, wrote: ‘Anna Wintour would never walk in and throw down her coat and handbag on a desk. No. At Vogue, girls did not run down the halls in stiletto heels into Ms. Wintour’s office. No. They got it so wrong.

Meryl Streep did a great job in the movie. It was a combination of Anna Wintour and [the late Harper’s Bazaar editor] Liz Tilberis.  ‘But the man who played me [referencing Stanley Tucci]? No! It did not reflect the real world of Vogue.’ Talley added that he was initially approached to play the role himself, but turned it down. 

While Talley pointed out the differences between real life and the movie, he said in the past that every single thing Wintour wore, apart from her underwear, was sent to the dry cleaners, and that just like in the film, one of her assistants had to bring the mockup of the current issue of Vogue, plus flowers and her clean clothes, to her home. And Anna has gained the nickname ‘Nuclear Wintour’ due to her demeanour.

‘I’m scared of her. Everyone’s scared of her,’ said fashion writer Plum Sykes in the 2000 BBC documentary Boss Woman. ‘She’s an intimidating person because she is so incredible.’ While Talley said that nobody at Vogue would run for their heels, Sykes said of the Vogue dress code: ‘Anna would never specify how you need to look, but I know that if I went into her office I would need to wear high heels and look groomed and look “fashion”. 

‘The clothes that people wear here in the day are clothes that most people would wear on their most glamorous night out of the year. Who’s going to wear a chiffon Dolce & Gabbana skirt like this to the office? Only someone who works at Vogue.’ Wintour’s former assistant Lauren Weisberger wrote the book The Devil Wears Prada, and the fashion icon was said to be furious about the character Miranda Priestley, with reports claiming that she threatened designers that Vogue would no longer cover them if they made cameo appearances in the movie.

However, Wintour, 70, later called the film ‘really entertaining’ and said: ‘Anything that makes fashion entertaining and glamorous and interesting is wonderful for our industry. So I was 100 percent behind it.’ In 2017, when Anna interviewed Meryl Streep for Vogue, she asked the actress who was the most challenging woman she’d ever played. Streep said: ‘I should say’ – gesturing towards Wintour – with the mogul joking: ‘No. No. We’re not going there, Meryl.’

The video of the interview also made reference to the movie, with Meryl’s elevator journey mimicking that of Miranda’s in the Runway offices.  The Devil Wears Prada – also starring Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt – charted an aspiring journalist’s time as assistant to the editor-in-chief of a world famous fashion magazine.