Remember that iconic cerulean scene in The Devil Wears Prada? Of course you do: It’s one of Miranda Priestly’s iciest, most savage moments. It takes place after Andy (Anne Hathaway) snickers over a discussion of which belt is best for a shoot. Miranda (Meryl Streep) quickly shuts her down with a monologue about where, exactly, Andy’s sweater came from.
Here’s a clip, in case you forgot:
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Now play the whole thing back in your head and imagine that it’s about her plaid skirt instead of a sweater—because that’s how it went down in an early version of the script.
The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, shared some intel about the monologue during a discussion at Vulture Festival L.A. this week. We can recite every line of Miranda’s clap back about the origins of Andy Sach’s “lumpy blue sweater” now, but originally McKenna had toyed with the idea of making the lecture about plaid.
“There was a point when [costume designer Patricia Field] thought it was going to be a plaid skirt. I wrote a whole Vivienne Westwood angle—obviously. But there was a sweater, and it was blue. The short version is, they sat on the script for a long time, and I made that script speech longer, longer, longer,” McKenna said. “Then I worked with Meryl [Streep] and [director] David [Frankel] and made it way too long. I sent it to David and said, ‘This is way too long; you’ll never use all of this, but this is what I’ve got.’ I had also sent Meryl a list of blues: lapis, azure, cerulean. She picked cerulean.”
Meryl Streep, of course, nailed the scene, but McKenna said not everyone was pleased with how it turned out. “A lot of the fashion stuff I just made up because none of it was going to be real. It just sounded real,” McKenna said. “After the movie came out, someone was dinging us that it wasn’t based on real fashion stuff.”
