Leslie Fremar, a celebrity stylist who claims to be the inspiration behind the The Devil Wears Prada character Emily, recently opened up about her feelings toward the book that the now classic 2006 comedy was based on.
The Devil Wears Prada, released in 2003, was written by Lauren Weisberger, who Fremar had hired to work with her while she was first assistant to Vogue boss Anna Wintour, on whom Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly was based.
Fremar told Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast that an early copy of the book was “quite mean,” but “softened.”
“I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me,” Fremar said. “I was petrified. [Wintour] said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger?’ And I said, ‘She was your junior assistant.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.’”
“It just felt like this exposure,” she continued. “Even though someone obviously advised her to make it fiction, it was really based off of a lot of things that, you know, I lived, she lived.”
“There wasn’t this lightness to it. It felt quite dark,” she explained in the episode, which was published on April 28. “I found that quite hurtful. I think what got put into the world is a lighter, nicer version of what she actually wrote.”
The style pro also noted that she felt very exposed by the novel. “I remember feeling like it was a betrayal, at the time,” Fremar said. “People weren’t very public about their jobs.”
Fremar asserted that she “is” the character made famous by Emily Blunt’s portrayal in the early aughts film, and that she “definitely told” the novel’s author that a million girls would kill for her assistant job, which evolved into the now-famous line said by Blunt.
In the movie, Emily Charlton, played by Emily Blunt, is Miranda’s first assistant and rival to Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, Miranda’s second assistant and aspiring journalist. The stylist was a first assistant to Wintour at the time of her day-to-day connection with the author, whom she doesn’t plan on reconnecting with despite the success of her story. “I think it would be very awkward,” she said on the podcast. “I don’t hold a grudge towards her, it became something that I don’t think she knew that I knew, and I think it would just, there’s nothing to be said.”
IGN’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 review returned a 7/10. We said: “If you’re looking to effortlessly slip back into the glossy and charming world of New York high fashion, you’ll be delighted by the familiarity The Devil Wears Prada 2 provides. But if you want exact same characters that you met in the first movie, you might find the movie quite a change of pace.”
Photo by Jamie McCarthy/WireImage.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
