In a role reversal, Ned Martel takes the mic to interview Jill about her two decades at Vogue, timed to the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2. As the assistant who hired Lauren Weisberger, and the woman who turns up on page 21 of the novel, Jill has a firsthand stake in a story the culture keeps retelling. She walks Ned through the day the galley arrived, Anna's pivot from private hurt to public ownership of the movie, and her own running defense of the leather pants.
From there the conversation opens into an oral history of the job. Jill describes Vogue in 1998: no iPhones, twenty-five handwritten phone messages waiting every morning, a diary read upside-down across the desk, and a telepathy with Anna so refined that hearing her own name was sometimes the whole question. She lays out the Monday fashion, Tuesday features, Thursday scheduling choreography, and the creative friction between Grace Coddington, Camilla Nickerson, and Anna that produced stories no other magazine could match.
Jill and Ned trade stories about the September 2006 Marie Antoinette cover at Versailles, the La La Land campaign and the notes Anna accidentally sent to Damien Chazelle, the cautionary tale of The Shipping News, the Lady Gaga anniversary issue, and the Chanel sunglasses Jill hunted across every Four Seasons gift shop in the country. She reflects on what she inherited from Anna: efficiency, anticipation, and the refusal to take no for an answer. The episode closes with Anna's own going-away speech for Jill, read aloud for the first time.
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Going Rogue is produced by Jill Demling and Maddie Kelly, who also serves as our social media director. Matty Rosenberg is the executive producer Be sure to follow Going Rogue on your favorite podcast platform.
Going Rogue is part of the Radio Free Rhinecliff media network.
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