Lauren Weisberger assisted Anna Wintour for almost a year before writing and publishing The Devil Wears Prada, which set off an unquenchable thirst for horror stories about fetching coffee and carrying clothes around for the world’s top fashion people. Weisberger has a new book out, but The Devil Wears Prada is all the Daily Mail really cares about, so that’s what they interviewed her about. She recalls her time at Vogue:
’I knew I was tall and thin, but I was short and fat there.’
Where she differed from [Devil Wears Prada protagonist Andy Sachs] was that she ‘never got to raid the closet because I never had time, although the other girls did and they wore the most fabulous things to parties. And I never went to Paris. French Vogue provided Anna with assistants when she was over there.
Hopefully Vogue never gets bedbugs, then, if the chicks are wearing the samples everywhere.
She continues:
’And unlike Andy I couldn’ t force myself to wear high heels. It was expected of me, but I ran all day, all over the office, up and down the building 1,000 times and to Starbucks six times a day, so there was no way I could manage even a 2in heel.
’I wore these horrible, black platform boots with a thick rubber sole because there was no choice. And even though for a couple of weeks I made the boot-to-high-heels switch under my desk, I just had to forget it in the end. She would stare at them in disgust and it was a stare that conveyed her displeasure pretty clearly.’
Presumably, the other ladies who wore fur crop tops to the office did not have to deal with this.
’How they believed it was acceptable to show their midriff in the workplace and how they’d come in to work wearing leather trousers, stiletto heels and furry tops [Lauren, it must be said, hails from rural Pennsylvania].
’They wore the most outrageous outfits and even though they all looked fabulous in them, it was hard to think of any other corporation where that would have been acceptable. They’d go to the filing cabinet dripping in jewels and even though I was there for almost a year, that aspect of the job continued to amaze me.’
But that is the best thing about working in a fashion non-corporate environment. People can wear pillowcases with bumble-bee antennae and say, “Oh. it’s fashion. I’m just in the know. What are YOU, hmmm?” and not be in violation of any dress-code policies.
Think the boss in The Devil Wears Prada was a total monster? Well she was even scarier in real life [Daily Mail UK]
