Meryl Streep has “so many thoughts” about fashion and the first lady.
The triple Oscar-winner was featured on the cover of Vogue on Tuesday, alongside the magazine’s Global Director, fashion icon Anna Wintour, where she took the opportunity to take a few shots at Mrs. Trump. During the dual interview, conducted by filmmaker Greta Gerwig, Streep and Wintour were asked how women should dress to “communicate power.”
While Wintour lauded former first lady Michelle Obama as one she “admires,” and New York City’s new first lady, Rama Duwaji, whom she said “looks so cool,” the best compliment she could muster up for Melania was that she “always looks like herself when she dresses.”
Added Streep, on the subject of first ladies, “I have so many thoughts about this. 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. All dress is about expressing yourself, but we’re also subject to larger historical and political sweeps of expectation.”
The first lady was visiting the New Hope Children’s Shelter in McAllen, Texas, at the time in 2018, and explained the inopportune message on her cargo jacket as being “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me.”
The digs come after Melania Trump whined in 2022 that she was never featured on the cover of Vogue during her husband’s time in office, despite Mrs. Obama and Mrs. Clinton having graced the pages.
“They’re biased, and they have likes and dislikes, and it’s so obvious. And I think American people and everyone sees it. It was their decision, and I have much more important things to do—and I did in the White House—than being on the cover of Vogue,” she said at the time.
Mrs. Trump previously appeared once on the magazine’s cover in 2005 to announce her wedding to Trump.
Wintour addressed the matter in 2019 in an interview with CNN. “I don’t think it’s a moment not to take a stand,” she said, after explaining she’d signed off on Mrs. Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s cover stories because they were “icons and inspiring to women from a global perspective.”
“I think you can’t be everything to everybody,” she went on, “and I think it’s a time that we live in a world, as you would well know, of fake news… [and] those of us that work at Conde Nast believe that you have to stand up for what you believe in and you have to take a point of view.”
Streep, who plays a fictionalized version of Wintour in her soon-to-be reprised role of Miranda Priestly for The Devil Wears Prada 2, also believes in taking a stand, as she’s repeatedly called out Trump over the years. Wintour told Vogue that she trusts the actress “implicitly” to play her on screen, though she was apprehensive to hear of a sequel.
“When I heard rumors that this new film might be happening, I called Meryl to ask if it was true,” Wintour said Tuesday. “I knew she would tell me if it was going to be all right. She hadn’t yet read the script, so she said she’d call me back. And that’s what she did. She read the script. She called me back and said, ‘Anna, I think it’s going to be all right.’”
“She told me very little about what happens in the film, but I trusted her implicitly,” she added.
