I didn’t think The Devil Wears Prada 2 would make me cry, but it did. All the fashiony high camp, all the sharp one-liners of the first movie (“By all means, move at a glacial pace, you know how that thrills me”) deliquesce into melancholy for a struggling media industry in the second film. We meet the older Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) – the put-upon assistant of Runway editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) in the original movie – when she and her newspaper colleagues are receiving an award for investigative reporting. Except that at precisely that moment they are laid off, by text message. Perfectly realistic: swathes of the Washington Post, including Pulitzer finalists and correspondents in war zones, suffered a similar fate (in this case, sacking by email subject field) in February.
I didn’t think it would make me feel so nostalgic, either. The original Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006. Watching this thinly disguised portrait of American Vogue then was fun. I had served my apprenticeship at Condé Nast, at British Vogue and The World of Interiors, and I felt some vague kinship with Andy and her terrible blue jumper, who arrives a sceptic, goes native, then leaves for her true calling at a progressive newspaper. But now, 20 years on, other feelings crowd in. As my former Vogue colleague Louise Chunn wrote in the New Statesman recently, in the 1990s we had no idea we were working “at the high watermark of the circulation and power of the glossy magazine industry”. When those enormous, thick-papered tomes thunked down on our desks at Vogue House (which they literally did, hand delivered) they were so solid, so reassuring, so full of the promise of glamour and gorgeousness, that we thought it would go on for ever.
It was, of course, a preposterous world. At Vogue I was in the copyeditors room, a self-contained island of grammatical exactitude. We were guardians of the style guide, a haven from which dangling modifiers and misspellings of Dolce & Gabbana (two Bs, one N!) were strictly forbidden. I had been allowed in after an interview with a grand lady from HR who asked me what my father did. She required me to take a pay cut from my previous job (down to £11,000 if I recall) on the grounds that, yes, a million girls would kill for that job. From the perspective of the subs’ rookery, most of the copy had to be forcibly wrangled into shape, to put it mildly. My own first foray into writing was a small item commissioned by the deputy editor, Anna Harvey, whom Princess Diana used to consult on her frocks. It was about why it was un-chic to travel in a black cab covered in ads. A prominent mineral water company, offended, pulled its advertising account from the mag as a result. Oops.
Alexander McQueen’s champion Isabella Blow used to float by occasionally in her astonishing hats. I subbed Nigella Lawson’s first cookery column. There was a lady within earshot called Hicky, who seemed to be quite often chatting on the phone to, or gossiping about, Twiggy. My boss, the queen of the copy room, scion of an incredibly famous aristocratic family, wore Gap jeans and rode an ancient bicycle to work every day. She was magnificent, though she nearly sacked me (having been liberated from writing mail-order-catalogue copy on a light industrial estate in Oxfordshire, I lost a bit of focus when I reached the gold-paved streets of the capital). But she gave me a second chance and everything worked out. She projected sublime indifference to the clothes, but then shocked everyone by buying a Chanel leather coat featured in the magazine. She unpicked the buttons, with their interlocking Cs, and sewed on ones she liked.
I would like to report that my time involved a personal transformation into Chanel myself, like Andy in the first film, but who are we kidding? H&M was the go-to for the junior echelons in those days. When I left, they gave me the most 1990s leaving card possible (Begbie from Trainspotting flipping a V) and a gorgeous pashmina, which, to my infinite regret, I lost in Odesa in 2024 when reporting on the war in Ukraine.
I have a small archive from that time: a memo dated 10 January 1996 from the editor’s assistant, postponing an editorial meeting so it wouldn’t clash with “the Manolo sale”; and an announcement from the then managing director, Nicholas Coleridge, that the roof garden was now open but “please don’t go too close to the edge and topple over”. At times things felt beyond parody, but that was by no means true, since, deliciously, there was a spoof-memo writer at large. One pitch-perfect number, titled “Arriving on Time – Reminder”, had Coleridge purportedly chiding staff for “tending to drift in rather late, particularly when there is a major industrial dispute causing a complete shutdown of the London tube network” and instructing employees to foresee strikes, IRA bomb scares and floods. It contained a list of supposed “useful telephone numbers” including the Acas offices, Michael Fish at the London Weather Centre, Coleridge’s personal chauffeur and, in those days before the Northern Ireland peace process, Sinn Féin HQ.
Happy days, then, sort of. The 1990s was the era of the size-zero model and heroin chic. I remember seeing a clutch of high-ups discussing whether it was OK, in a nude photo of two models, to airbrush out the protruding ribs so that the women (or “girls” as they would have been called) didn’t look off-puttingly starved. I got hauled up by HR once for doing something that looked very slightly like union organising. The World of Interiors – the Condé Nast stablemate to which I moved next, and where I adored my co-workers – had an extraordinary, terrifying boss whose modus operandi, it is fair to say, would not have survived modern dignity-at-work protocols, nor indeed legal frameworks, since she chain-smoked Gauloises at her desk. Min Hogg once extended a bony, nicotine-stained finger, poked my Ghost-clad midriff and asked me if I was pregnant. She often wore a turban. One day when she was out, the entire staff of the magazine, in a mood of crazed liberation, made turbans out of scrap fabric and photographed ourselves in them. In 2006, when I was already ensconced at the Guardian, I saw Hogg shooting gleefully down a helter-skelter installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall: she was always game.
For me, these memories of the 1990s are perfumed by the politics of the time. The Tories were in their death-throes. The MP Jonathan Aitken had lied and lied and lied. In May 1997, I stayed up all night watching the election results and then, with a colleague from Interiors, went to Downing Street to watch the new PM arrive. Diana died, and was buried on my 25th birthday. A month later I got a job at the Guardian. There, I found my tribe. And even if the Guardian sacked me by text tomorrow, I couldn’t ever imagine going back to that glossy world.
-
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
