Lifestyle blogger said to have inspired Devil Wears Prada character uses unpaid student interns | Life and style

She is said to have inspired a character in The Devil Wears Prada and was Anna Wintour’s personal assistant. So Plum Sykes knows a thing or two about the challenging and often unglamorous life of being an intern in the fashion industry.

But it appears that this recognition does not include paying its own interns a fair wage. Or actually any fee.

Vogue editor Sykes started her own Substack, which has more than 20,000 followers; some of them pay £65 for their thoughts. To help him run his new business, the Cotswolds-based author hires students who help him out for free. He came under criticism for not paying them anything for their work.

The blog features personal messages, such as posts ranking her favorite house guests by how much they spent on a gift when they came to her house.

Sykes not only pays the students who help with this venture, but also buys them lavish gifts. Sykes recently boasted that one of them bought Hermès gloves. retail £500 and £1,000.

Pandora Sykes (no relation), a former editor of magazines and newspapers, commented in an online blog post about unpaid interns: “I remember the days when I only worked for expenses. In 2026, there is nowhere – EVERY – not to pay contributors no matter how they contribute.”

Plum is related to a baronet and her family a sprawling ancestral estate He admitted he wasn’t currently paying student workers in Yorkshire but “hopefully that could change”.

His great-grandfather was Mark Sykes, who drafted the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which set out an agreement between France and Britain on how Arab lands in the Middle East would be divided. married to businessman Toby RowlandMultimillionaire son of famous businessman Tiny Rowland.

Sykes is said to be the inspiration behind Emily Blunt’s stylish and aloof character in Devil Wears Prada; The book on which the film is based was written by one of Wintour’s other former assistants.

Sykes said his current group of young people have done a variety of tasks for him, including a neuroscience student in Paris who provided him with a photographer and helped with analytics, and a creative writing student who Sykes wrote on his social media “worked tirelessly for a year.” Another intern, studying at King’s College London, helped her come up with stories and ideas, and a St Andrews student edited her writing and wrote her captions “in a very soft voice”.

He said one intern looked like Cindy Crawford, wearing a “light pink Sporty Rich cricket sweater with a tortoiseshell headband,” while the other had “miles of golden curls” and “beautiful clothes.”

Labor law guidelines State that it is an unpaid internship It is only legal if the work is a mandatory requirement for a student as part of their course, is for a charity, or if the work only involves monitoring workers and does not perform any work-related duties. Sykes says his interns fall into this category.

If an intern is doing productive work rather than shadowing, they are legally entitled to the national minimum wage. Previous governments have told industries including fashion and media to stop using unpaid interns, saying those who do so may be acting illegally.

Sykes’ employer, Condé Nast, was previously forced to pay $5.8 million to former interns in a class-action lawsuit accusing the magazine company of underpaying its employees. In some cases, interns earned a dollar an hour.

In a recent post, she bemoaned the lack of unpaid internships at the media company, writing: “There are no official internships at Condé Nast. Interns are no longer allowed. Something to do with HR or H&S or similar bureaucracy.”

Sophie Sajnani, who runs a university consultancy and works with young people, said: “These laws exist for a reason: Workers know what their value is, they can negotiate fairly, and they are protected against discrimination. Condé Nast shut down its internship program when it had to face the cost of unpaid labor. Ten years later, the same pattern is emerging again, not within institutions but through individuals with enough power to replicate it.”

Commenting on the criticism, Sykes said: “These are people with work experience who, for example, follow me on fashion appointments, do a few hours of additional work experience. This allows them to gain experience, earn credit for their courses and help them in their future careers.”

“There’s a big legal difference between work experience and a formal, paid internship, which this isn’t. It’s a very casual situation. They’ve sometimes done occasional unscheduled tasks for me, but there are no set hours and any tasks they do are entirely voluntary.”

Carl Cullinane, director of research and policy at the Sutton Trust, said: “Internships are an increasingly critical route to top jobs and it is shocking that many employers today still pay interns below minimum wage, or worse, no wage at all.”

TUC general secretary Paul Nowak added: “Unpaid apprenticeships, trials and shadow training are rampant. And the losers are working-class young people.

“If young people continue to be pressured to work for free, legislation change will be needed to make it clear that working for free is illegal.”

Sykes added: “When I posted my advert I received a flood of applications from university leavers. This is a reflection of how difficult the media job market is at the moment.”

“They were often already working part-time jobs and still wanted unpaid work experience. Even though I knew it was the only way to get through to the media, I had to tell them that I was only considering people who were still students and could ‘earn’ credit towards their degree in exchange for the work experience I could give them.”

“I turned away a lot of people. I told them that if they left college, I wouldn’t stop them from getting paid work and that should be their main focus.”