🎥 Watched The Devil Wears Prada.

Only 18 years after its release, which if I vaguely remember at the time was something of a phenomenon, at least in my circles. And somehow it was nothing like I expected.

Starring wannabe serious journalist, it’s Emily in Paris, except it’s only Andy’s extraordinarily harsh boss that thinks she’s called Emily. It’s Ugly Betty, with similarly mean harassment of the main character.

Andy accidentally chances her way into the extremely difficult job of working for an extremely difficult fashion magazine boss, a subject that she knows and cares nothing about, at first at least.

Improbably it may be, but it seems that it’s based on a certain amount of reality. The film is adapted from the book of the same name. The book’s author, Lauren Weisberger, was in fact the lowly assistant of real life Anna Wintour, Vogue magazine’s editor in chief.

Wintour developed a reputation for being “icy and scary and fabulous” and was given nicknames such as Nuclear Wintour and Wintour of Our Discontent

Whilst Wintour couldn’t even remember who Weisberger was at first, Miranda Priestly seems to be rather based on her. Wintour had a similar hierarchy of assistants that were expected to work like nothing else matters in life, and much of the stuff they are shown to endure in the film seems to have happened for real, a couple of examples, as reported by E!, below.

Asplundh, who started as an intern at Condé Nast in 1993 and was hired to be Wintour’s second assistant one month later, revealed that Wintour addressed her using the first assistant’s name when she first began working at Vogue.

And Asplundh said she was told not to leave her desk, even to go to the bathroom, if the other assistant was not around—just like Andie