Now it’s Theresa the Vogue pin-up
How will the PM top those £995 leather trews... in shoot for US glossy edited by the newly ennobled Dame Anna Wintour?
HER high-end wardrobe choices have already caused a storm in austerity Britain – and now Theresa May is to grace the pages of the world’s most influential fashion bible.
The Prime Minister has secretly posed for celebrated portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz in a fashion shoot for American Vogue.
Mrs May’s spread in the forthcoming April edition is said to be part of a charm offensive as she prepares to meet Donald Trump. But it has raised eyebrows because it comes just weeks after Anna Wintour, the glossy’s long-serving editor, received a damehood in the New Year’s Honours List.
And it follows the ‘Trousergate’ storm, which erupted after Mrs May wore a £995 pair of leather trousers by Amanda Wakeley for a magazine feature, only for Tory Nicky Morgan to criticise her extravagance. It earned the anti-Brexit MP Ms Morgan a ban from No 10.
The fruits of the Prime Minister’s modelling session for Leibovitz, who has taken some of the most memorable images of the past 40 years, will be unveiled in the issue which goes on sale in March – the month Mrs May is expected to travel to Washington for her first meeting with the new US President. It is also the month she has vowed to trigger the Article 50 process to withdraw Britain from the EU.
A senior source said: ‘The Vogue shoot will form a central part of Operation Trump. Theresa knows she needs to raise her profile in the US and Anna Wintour was only too keen to help.’
Mrs May and her Downing Street aides were wrong-footed by Mr Trump’s shock election victory, with former Ukip leader Nigel Farage winning the race to become the first British politician to meet the President-elect.
The PM is now set to meet Mr Trump within the next two months, after two of her key aides travelled to Washington last month to pave the way.
The Prime Minister has long been a fan of Vogue, and said a lifetime subscription to the magazine would be her luxury item when she appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
But her choice of the US title over the UK edition – for which former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher posed in a 1985 photoshoot with David Bailey – is striking.
The deputy editor of the British edition is Emily Sheffield, the younger sister of Samantha Cameron. And when Mrs May took power after the Brexit vote, Ms Sheffield spoke angrily about how she ‘deplored’ the ‘casual denigration’ of the achievements of David Cameron’s Government by the new regime, who, she said, suggested that ‘the reign of the Cameroons was about posh boys with vanity projects’. A Downing Street spokesman said the decision to pose for Ms Leibovitz was taken before Mr Trump’s victory, because Mrs May was a lifelong fan of the magazine.
He added that Ms Wintour’s honour had been proposed by the Foreign Office. Ms Leibovitz’s work stretches back to her days as a photographer for Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s, when she captured the last official image of John Lennon and Yoko Ono just five hours before he was killed.
The 67-year-old photographer, who commands fees of up to £150,000 a day, has also taken official pictures of the Queen, including one for her 90th birthday last year.