Even Anna Wintour can’t say no to Meryl Streep.
Vogue’s global editorial director will appear alongside Streep on the magazine’s May 2026 cover. This is the first time he has appeared on the cover of his own publication. But as Stuff revealed on Vogue’s podcast The Run Through this week, getting both women to agree wasn’t easy.
Chloe Malle, the magazine’s new head of editorial content, said Winter had turned down cover requests before, but Streep, who worked on the magazine’s covers in 2012 and 2017, “felt like it was an automatic no.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 will be released on May 1st, so Vogue wanted a cover to coincide with this time, but Hathaway has already appeared in the August issue, and Blunt is also working on her own cover.
Ms. Malle proposed the idea for a common cover to Ms. Wintour during Paris Fashion Week last October, shortly after she took office. “I said, ‘Anna, it would be kind of amazing to have you and Meryl on the cover,'” Malle recalled. “And she said, ‘Well, Chloe, that’s great, but that’s not my style.'”
Streep then apparently asked: “And that was a different answer. So you know who’s more persuasive.”
In the cover story itself, Malle writes that the effort required “no small amount of arm-twisting.”
The fictional Miranda Priestly and her two real-life female inspirations wear bespoke Prada on the cover. In Mal’s words, “Two devils, two Pradas.”
The shoot, shot by Annie Leibovitz and styled by Grace Coddington, was held in secret for months. Mull said the project “made Pentagon documents look like Richard Scarry books.”
Virginia Smith, director of Vogue’s global fashion network, called all the clothes alone to avoid arousing suspicion, and described the outreach to the designers as “a puzzle of vague references to the shoot and then outright lies.”
Coddington had to be smuggled into Vogue’s offices for a fitting. “Anna felt it was questionable to put Grace here,” Smith said. “So I had to hide Grace and take her to a small area in the fitting room so no one could see her.”
Despite the cloak and dagger logistics, the two cover stars hit it off easily. Smith said that on a cold fitting day at the Crosby Hotel, Streep and Wintour walked in wearing matching sunshine yellow scarves, which was completely unexpected. “Anna was really excited and said, ‘I have to take a picture,'” Maru recalled.
The cover will be released just before The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theaters on May 1st, the same week that Wintour hosts the Met Gala.
Streep’s Miranda Priestly was famously influenced by Wintour, and the editor has embraced her devilish reputation all year, from her cheeky clash with Hathaway at the Oscars to her reunion with Streep at Milan Fashion Week last fall.
“People have made millions of dollars from books and movies about Anna,” a source told Page Six. “Why don’t you have some fun, Anna?”
