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Molly Rogers’s Well-Worn Path to Costuming “The Devil Wears Prada 2”
Key takeaways
- But, as any good costumer knows, if the footwear is wrong the whole ensemble goes sideways.
- For the Saks outing, she was wearing a black bucket hat emblazoned with the word “Runaway” in white—a gag gift, she explained, from the “Devil Wears Prada 2” costume department to the rest of the cast and crew.
- Rogers has a gift for making people see garments in a new way—and for seeing the potential in items that others might write off as merely ridiculous.
Illustration by Laura Edelbacher Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story On a recent morning in Manhattan, the veteran costume designer Molly Rogers, a cheerful blonde with a honeyed Southern drawl, was standing outside Saks Fifth Avenue, waiting for the store to open. She needed to return a pair of Stella Mc Cartney heels she’d bought, about a week before, to wear to the New York première of her latest project, “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” They had a gold chain across the front, which echoed a gold-chain collar that she planned to wear in honor of the late fashion editor Diana Vreeland. But, as any good costumer knows, if the footwear is wrong the whole ensemble goes sideways. These were too matchy-matchy, Rogers had decided. “Back they go,” she told me, swinging a Saks bag on one arm. In the end, she wore a “vintage shoe by no one.”
For the Saks outing, she was wearing a black bucket hat emblazoned with the word “Runaway” in white—a gag gift, she explained, from the “Devil Wears Prada 2” costume department to the rest of the cast and crew. In Milan, where the denouement of the film takes place, Rogers explained, the Italian crew members continually misspelled the title of Runway, the film’s fictional fashion magazine, and the typo became a running joke. Rogers had paired the hat with a Kelly-green Tibi sweatshirt that had large cutouts in the sleeves where elbow patches might be, and she’d shoved her arms right through these holes, so that the lower half of each sleeve dangled off her forearms like the sode on a kimono.
Rogers has a gift for making people see garments in a new way—and for seeing the potential in items that others might write off as merely ridiculous. Take Rogers’s work on “And Just Like That . . ,” the sometimes beloved, sometimes maligned “Sex and the City” reboot that ran for three gloriously campy seasons on HBO Max. Rogers put Carrie Bradshaw—never the sartorial wallflower—in some of her wackiest pieces to date, including a JW Anderson bejewelled pigeon purse and a ginormous Moncler sleeping-bag coat, not to mention the show’s most virally divisive item, a flamboyant, gingham sun hat, as wide and poofy as a dog bed, by the milliner Maryam Keyhani. “I got death threats for that hat,” Rogers told me. “People thought she looked like strawberry shortcake.”