The Devil Wears Prada, Too

It’s almost quaint to read now, but author Lauren Weisberger spent the majority of her 2003 press tour for the release of The Devil Wears Prada trying to distance it from its obvious source material. “So much of the book is composed of stories from my friends,” she told Publishers Weekly at the time. “A lot of my girlfriends ended up in publishing and in magazines, or doing fashion PR or advertising. Horror stories are the same the world over.”

Weisberger’s horror stories took place at Vogue , under the watchful eye of then-Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, who was widely considered to be the basis for the fictional tyrant Miranda Priestly of Runway magazine. In the years since, the book, the film, a musical, and the film sequel have become a cultural phenomenon that far outpaced any initial media gossip about its publication—to the point that over the past few weeks, surrounding the May 1 premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2 , Vogue itself has published dozens of stories pegged to it.

But this embrace by the publication is a sharp shift from when the book first was released. Travel with me, if you will, back to 2003. At the time, Wintour’s party line regarding the book was carefully practiced in its casualness. A piece by David Carr for The New York Times , in which he outlined the moves she had made to keep Vogue ahead of the pack in terms of relevancy—which notably included putting celebrities on the cover at a time when models were the go-to—ends with this vignette: