I’ve witnessed Anna Wintour’s chilly persona first-hand, but I will always defend her

A book, a movie, a stage show, a sequel to a movie… There seems to be an endless public appetite for the story of a young woman who has no idea how lucky she is, gets the best possible starting job at a fashion magazine, succeeds in spite of herself (totally disrespectful of her superiors or the industry they work in, no personal style), and then walks away from it all, feeling won over.

As an insider of a fashion magazine (I was the editor of the British magazine) by hand (I covered international designer shows for this newspaper for years, had dinner with Karl Lagerfeld, lunch with John Paul Gaultier, and laughed a lot with Vivienne Westwood), this was my first take on the subject.

But over time, I started to like the movie. The Devil Wears Prada As much as the next woman who buys a pair of shoes she doesn’t really need. Which is all of us, right?

This is a thoroughly polished and sophisticated film, with hilarious one-liners, a fresh take on the fish-out-of-water trope, and one of the biggest transformations in film. And Paris. And Stanley Tucci.

Much better than the book.

When this came out in 2003, it made me see red as the new black. Based on Lauren Weisberger’s experience working as the real Anna Wintour’s assistant at US Vogue, after being given the privilege of her first job in fashion media, she turned around and betrayed not just Wintour but, it seems to me, the entire high fashion clan.

The legendary editor is nothing more than a psychopathic sadist; Her team is depicted as grinning, stupid hyper-bitches and the designers as helpless sycophants. Weisberger only worked on the world’s most important fashion title for 10 months, but he felt qualified to poke fun at two huge industries: fashion and glossy magazines (which were still very big business in the early 2000s) and all the people who worked in those magazines, all the while making himself a nice dollar from the project. This didn’t seem right. Smell it.

But then the movie came out… and I forgave it, got over myself, and just had fun. There are also certain moments in the film that elevate the film above the revenge-memoir level; The most important of these is the famous “sky blue sweater” speech (which is not included in the book). That’s when Runway (Vogue) magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour; no one denies this anymore, not even Wintour herself) uses the ugly, cheap knitwear worn by her new second assistant, Andrea, to explain how the entire fashion system that Andrea thinks she’s above actually works. Dripping down.

Starting from the original ideas and choices of major designers (in this case, the very specific shade of blue of the dreaded sweater), these are then analyzed and selected as key trends by experts in fashion magazines, which are then spread throughout the global clothing industry.

As Miranda puts it: “And then it filtered through department stores and into a tragic Casual Corner, where you no doubt pulled it out of a dumpster. But that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s funny how you think you’re making a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when you’re actually wearing a sweater that was chosen for you by the people in this room.”

This monologue, delivered flawlessly by Meryl Streep as Priestly, makes up for any insults to the original book concept. Even Wintour said this in an interview about the new movie in the USA. Vogue. “What I liked about the first movie,” he said, “was that it showed the world what a huge business fad there was. It was a real global economic force, and the first movie acknowledged that.”

He’s not exaggerating. If the fashion industry were a country, it would be competing to be among the world’s 10 largest economies. Yet the entire behemoth and everyone who sails within it continues to be dismissed as pointless and irrelevant, which is one of the reasons why the negative mythology around Anna Wintour’s personality and workplace style always bites my toes.

No doubt it is demanding. I heard this from friends who worked with him, and I witnessed firsthand the cold personality he presented to the world from behind his multifaceted shadows. I’ve sat across from fashion catwalks for decades of my life, and once stood behind her in a queue for the toilets at the exhibition center in Milan. Literally up close and personal.

So it’s not hot. But he is incredibly hardworking and disciplined. She plays tennis every day before work, blow-dries her hair in between, and blow-dries her hair twice a day on vacation. The hairdresser who did the blow dry in St Barts told me this. And he said he read the evidence for each one.

So he’s incredibly disciplined, super smart, and globally successful. Why does he have to be “cute” too? Are the CEOs of the Dow Jones’ 30 largest companies expected to be likeable? No, because they do “important” work (and they are overwhelmingly male).

Anna Wintour is doing a very important job (she’s currently global chief content officer and artistic director at Condé Nast), and I don’t need her to go easy on it, I just want her to continue to be great at it—but I think TDWP’s theme of the nightmare boss from hell is another source of the film’s such broad appeal.

We’ve all had it happen, which is why it’s so satisfying to see a monster boss win and then reveal its vulnerable soft core – and even more satisfying when it comes back to writing later.

The film also embraces another familiar workplace experience: that very special post-college phase of the first suitable job. When we come up about 17 years of predetermined staircases in the education system and suddenly have to figure out everything about the world on our own, massively and in real time, at very high risks. I remember this vividly; The closest thing to a skydiving experience.

These sources of interest relate to business life more generally, but one particular fashion element of the film that I particularly adore is “Andrea’s makeup.” When you see the way Anne Hathaway looks after art director Nigel (Tucci) recast her, it’s a wonder how costume designer Patricia Field managed to make her look gaudy and dull in the “before” section.

Walking in head-to-toe Chanel, Hathaway looks absolutely gorgeous and reminds me of one of my favorite parts of being a fashion magazine editor. In the first few months after a young person began working on a brilliant painting, I would have the opportunity to watch such transformations take place, from cygnet to swan style, especially by hand.

Unfortunately the magazines don’t have closets of seasonal designer clothes for staff to search through, as Nigel does. There is a “fashion closet” where clothes for shoots are locked away while they are borrowed from designers for very short periods of time; At this stage he only has one sample of the product; Example worn in the fashion show. Has anyone been caught helping themselves? HE the equipment would be decommissioned immediately.

Likewise, no one at Andrea’s salary level could afford to buy designer materials, even with press discounts. The best you could hope for were sample sales (sample sizes need to be eight and under) and the occasional donation from someone higher up in the fashion magazine food chain.

So while there weren’t any Chanel-esque looks passing my office, what I saw over and over again was the evolution of a gorgeous personal style that could be achieved on a low budget and the adoption of that magazine’s home aesthetic (they all have something like that). It was a pleasure to observe, even in young women who didn’t have Hathaway’s supermodel physiques.

That’s something I love about the movie, as someone in the industry. For civilians (sorry, as we call them, unfashionable folks), I think there’s another appeal: the unfading triumph of nerdy girls over mean girls that works equally well whether it’s a fashion magazine or one of the great phalanxes of American high school movies.

Meanwhile, in real life, the woman who was presented as the baddest girl of them all seems to be coming out on top. Anna Wintour isn’t just surviving TDWP flume ride owns it.

On the cover of the May issue of USA Vogue With Miranda Priestly… that is, Meryl Streep’s character. (Apparently, her friend Streep convinced her to do it.) Then they took it one step further and created a video clip of the two top editors meeting in an elevator. With dialogue. You should vote for anyone who wants to do lines with Meryl Streep for public consumption. Wintour performs very well in this regard; I especially like that she doesn’t carry a bag, which is always the case in real life. She never carries a handbag; Priestly/Streep does this and looks unpretentious for it.

Next TDWP The moment I look forward to is the premiere to see what they all wear; Which leads me to ask whether there would be an awkward moment at that event if Wintour were to meet Weisberger.

It doesn’t seem like it, because Wintour reportedly has no memory of working in Weisberger’s Vogue office. Miranda Priestly would be proud of her.

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