The Devil Wears Prada: Loved the movie? Read the book!

Emily had just been promoted to the position of senior assistant, leaving the junior assistant position open for me. She explained that she would spend two years as Miranda’s senior assistant, after which she’d be skyrocketed to an amazing fashion position at Runway. The three-year assistant program she’d be completing was the ultimate guarantee of going places in the fashion world, but I was clinging to the belief that my one-year sentence would suffice for The New Yorker. Allison had already left Miranda’s office area for her new post in the beauty department, where she’d be responsible for testing new makeup, moisturizers, and hair products and writing them up. I wasn’t sure how being Miranda’s assistant had prepared her for this task, but I was impressed nonetheless. The promises were true: people who worked for Miranda got places.

The rest of the staff began streaming in around ten, about fifty in all of editorial. The biggest department was fashion, of course, with close to thirty people, including all the accessories assistants. Features, beauty, and art rounded out the mix. Nearly everyone stopped by Miranda’s office to schmooze with Emily, overhear any gossip concerning her boss, and check out the new girl. I met dozens of people that first morning, everyone flashing enormous, toothy white smiles and appearing genuinely interested in meeting me.

The men were all flamboyantly gay, adorning themselves in second-skin leather pants and ribbed T’s that stretched over bulging biceps and perfect pecs. The art director, an older man sporting champagne blond, thinning hair, who looked like he dedicated his life to emulating Elton John, was turned out in rabbit-fur loafers and eyeliner. No one batted an eye. We’d had gay groups on campus, and I had a few friends who’d come out the past few years, but none of them looked like this. It was like being surrounded by the entire cast and crew of Rent – with better costumes, of course.

The women, or rather the girls, were individually beautiful. Collectively, they were mind-blowing. Most appeared to be about twenty-five, and few looked a day older than thirty. While nearly all of them had enormous, glimmering diamonds on their ring fingers, it seemed impossible that any had actually given birth yet – or ever would. In and out, in and out they walked gracefully on four-inch skinny heels, sashaying over to my desk to extend milky-white hands with long, manicured fingers, calling themselves ‘Jocelyn who works with Hope,’ ‘Nicole from fashion,’ and ‘Stef who oversees accessories.’ Only one, Shayna, was shorter than five-nine, but she was so petite it seemed impossible for her to carry another inch of height. All weighed less than 110 pounds.

As I sat in my swivel chair, trying to remember everyone’s name, the prettiest girl I’d seen all day swooped in. She wore a rose-colored cashmere sweater that looked like it was spun from pink clouds. The most amazing white hair swirled down her back. Her six-one frame looked as though it carried only enough weight to keep her upright, but she moved with the surprising grace of a dancer. Her cheeks glowed, and her multi-carat, flawless diamond engagement ring emanated an incredible lightness. I thought she’d caught me staring at it, since she flung her hand under my nose.

‘I created it,’ she announced, smiling at her hand and looking at me. I looked to Emily for an explanation, a hint as to who this might be, but she was on the phone again. I thought the girl was referring to the ring, meant that she had actually designed it, but then she said, ‘Isn’t it a gorgeous color? It’s one coat Marshmallow and one coat Ballet Slipper. Actually, Ballet Slipper came first, and then a topcoat to finish it off. It’s perfect – light colored without looking like you painted your nails with White Out. I think I’ll use this every time I get a manicure!’ And she turned on her heels and walked out. Ah, yes, a pleasure to meet you, too, I mentally directed toward her back as she strutted away.

I’d been enjoying meeting all my coworkers; everyone seemed kind and sweet and, except for the beautiful weirdo with the nail polish fetish, they all appeared interested in getting to know me. Emily hadn’t left my side yet, seizing every opportunity to teach me something. She provided running commentary on who was really important, whom not to piss off, whom it was beneficial to befriend because they threw the best parties. When I described Manicure Girl, Emily’s face lit up.

‘Oh!’ she breathed, more excited than I’d heard her about anyone else yet. ‘Isn’t she just amazing?’

‘Um, yeah, she seemed nice. We didn’t really get a chance to talk, she was just, you know, showing me her nail polish.’

Emily smiled widely, proudly. ‘Yes, well, you do know who she is, don’t you?’

I wracked my brain, trying to remember if she looked like any movie stars or singers or models, but I couldn’t place her. So, she was famous! Maybe that’s why she hadn’t introduced herself – I was supposed to recognize her. But I didn’t. ‘No, actually, I don’t. Is she famous?’

The stare I received in response was part disbelief, part disgust. ‘Um, yeah,’ Emily said, emphasizing the ‘yeah’ and squinting her eyes as if to say, You total fucking idiot. ‘That is Jessica Duchamps.’ She waited. I waited. Nothing. ‘You do know who that is, right?’ Again, I ran lists through my mind, trying to connect something with this new information, but I was quite sure I’d never, ever heard of her. Besides, this game was getting old.

‘Emily, I’ve never seen her before, and her name doesn’t sound familiar. Would you please tell me who she is?’ I asked, struggling to remain calm. The ironic part was that I didn’t even care who she was, but Emily was clearly not going to give this up until she’d made me look like a complete and total loser.

Her smile this time was patronizing. ‘Of course. You just had to say so. Jessica Duchamps is, well, a Duchamps! You know, as in the most successful French restaurant in the city! Her parents own it – isn’t that crazy? They are so unbelievably rich.’

‘Oh, really?’ I said, feigning enthusiasm for the fact that this super-pretty girl was worth knowing because her parents were restaurateurs. ‘That’s great.’

I answered a few phone calls with the requisite ‘Miranda Priestly’s office,’ although both Emily and I were worried that Miranda herself would call and I wouldn’t know what to do. Panic set in during a call when an unidentified woman barked something incoherent in a strong British accent, and I threw the phone to Emily without thinking to put it on hold first.

‘It’s her,’ I whispered urgently. ‘Take it.’

Emily gave me my first viewing of her specialty look. Never one to mince emotions, she could raise her eyebrows and drop her chin in a way that clearly conveyed equal parts disgust and pity.

‘Miranda? It’s Emily,’ she said, a bright smile lighting up her face as if Miranda might be able to seep through the phone and see her. Silence. A frown. ‘Oh, Mimi, so sorry! The new girl thought you were Miranda! I know, how funny. I guess we have to work on not thinking every British accent is necessarily our boss!’ She looked at me pointedly, her overtweezed eyebrows arching even higher.

She chatted a bit longer while I continued to answer the phone and take messages for Emily, who would then call the people back – with nonstop narration on their order of importance, if any, in Miranda’s life. About noon, just as the first hunger pangs were beginning, I picked up a call and heard a British accent on the other end.

‘Hello? Allison, is that you?’ asked the icy-sounding but regal voice. ‘I’ll be needing a skirt.’

I cupped my hand over the receiver and felt my eyes open wide. ‘Emily, it’s her, it’s definitely her,’ I hissed, waving the receiver to get her attention. ‘She wants a skirt!’

Emily turned to see my panic-stricken face and promptly hung up the phone without so much as ‘I’ll call you later’ or even ‘good-bye.’ She pressed the button to switch Miranda to her line, and plastered on another wide grin.

‘Miranda? It’s Emily. What can I do?’ She put her pen to her pad and began writing furiously, forehead furrowing intently. ‘Yes, of course. Naturally.’ And as fast as it happened, it was over. I looked at her expectantly. She rolled her eyes at me for appearing so eager.

‘Well, it looks like you have your first job. Miranda needs a skirt for tomorrow, among other things, so we’ll need to get it on a plane by tonight, at the latest.’

‘OK, well, what kind does she need?’ I asked, still reeling from the shock that a skirt would be traveling to St Barth’s simply because she’d requested it do so.

‘She didn’t say exactly,’ Emily muttered as she picked up the phone.

‘Hi, Jocelyn, it’s me. She wants a skirt, and I’ll need to have it on Mrs Marteau’s flight tonight, since she’ll be meeting Miranda down there. No, I have no idea. No, she didn’t say. I really don’t know. OK, thanks.’ She turned to me and said, ‘It makes it more difficult when she’s not specific. She’s too busy to worry about details like that, so she didn’t say what material or color or style or brand she wants. But that’s OK. I know her size, and I definitely know her taste well enough to predict exactly what she’ll like. That was Jocelyn from the fashion department. They’ll start calling some in.’ I pictured Jerry Lewis presiding over a skirt telethon with a giant scoreboard, drum role, and voilà! Gucci and spontaneous applause.

Not quite. ‘Calling in’ the skirts was my very first lesson in Runway ridiculousness, although I do have to say that the process was as efficient as a military operation. Either Emily or myself would notify the fashion assistants – about eight in all, who each maintained contacts within a specified list of designers and stores. The assistants would immediately begin calling all of their public relations contacts at the various design houses and, if appropriate, at upscale Manhattan stores and tell them that Miranda Priestly – yes, Miranda Priestly, and yes, it was indeed for her personal use – was looking for a particular item. Within minutes, every PR account exec and assistant working at Michael Kors, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Fendi, Armani, Chanel, Barney’s, Chloé, Calvin Klein, Bergdorf, Roberto Cavalli, and Saks would be messengering over (or, in some cases, hand-delivering) every skirt they had in stock that Miranda Priestly could conceivably find attractive. I watched the process unfold like a highly choreographed ballet, each player knowing exactly where and when and how their next step would occur. While this near-daily activity unfolded, Emily sent me to pick up a few other things that we’d need to send with the skirt that night.

‘Your car will be waiting for you on Fifty-eighth Street,’ she said while working two phone lines and scribbling instructions for me on a piece of Runway stationery. She paused briefly to toss me a cell phone and said, ‘Here, take this in case I need to reach you or you have any questions. Never turn it off. Always answer it.’ I took the phone and the paper and headed down to the 58th Street side of the building, wondering how I was ever going to find ‘my car.’ Or even, really, what that meant. I had barely stepped on the sidewalk and looked meekly around before a squat, gray-haired man gumming a pipe approached.

‘You Priestly’s new girl?’ he croaked through tobacco-stained lips, never removing the mahogany-colored pipe. I nodded. ‘I’m Rich. The dispatcher. You wanna car, you talka to me. Got it, blondie?’ I nodded again and ducked into the backseat of a black Cadillac sedan. He slammed the door shut and waved.

‘Where you going, miss?’ the driver asked, pulling me back to the present. I realized I had no idea and pulled the piece of paper from my pocket.

First stop: Ralph Lauren’s studio at 355 West 57th St., 6th Floor. Ask for Leanne. She’ll give you everything we need.

I gave the driver the address and stared out the window. It was one o’clock on a frigid winter afternoon, I was twenty-three years old, and I was riding in the backseat of a chauffeured sedan, on my way to Ralph Lauren’s studio. And I was positively starving. It took nearly forty-five minutes to go the fifteen blocks during the midtown lunch hour, my first glimpse of real city gridlock. The driver told me he’d circle the block until I came out again, and off I went to Ralph’s studio. When I asked for Leanne at the receptionist’s desk on the sixth floor, an adorable girl not a day older than eighteen came bounding down the stairs.

‘Hi!’ she called, stretching out the ‘I’ sound for a few seconds. ‘You must be Andrea, Miranda’s new assistant. We sure do love her around here, so welcome to the team!’ She grinned. I grinned. She pulled a massive plastic bag out from underneath a table and immediately spilled its contents on the floor. ‘Here we have Caroline’s favorite jeans in three colors, and we threw in some baby T’s, too. And Cassidy just adores Ralph’s khaki skirts – we gave them to her in olive and stone.’ Jean skirts, denim jackets, even a few pair of socks came flying out of the bag, and all I could do was stare: there were enough clothes to constitute four or more total preteen wardrobes. Who the hell are Cassidy and Caroline? I wondered, staring at the loot. What self-respecting person wears Ralph Lauren jeans – in three different colors, no less?

I must’ve looked thoroughly confused, because Leanne quite purposely turned her back while repacking the clothes and said, ‘I just know Miranda’s daughters will love this stuff. We’ve been dressing them for years, and Ralph insists on picking the clothes out for them himself.’ I shot her a grateful look and threw the bag over my shoulder.

‘Good luck!’ she called as the elevator doors closed, a genuine smile taking up most of her face. ‘You’re lucky to have such an awesome job!’ Before she could say it, I found myself mentally finishing the sentence – a million girls would die for it. And for that moment, having just seen a famous designer’s studio and in possession of thousands of dollars worth of clothes, I thought she was right.

Once I got the hang of things, the rest of the day flew. I debated for a few minutes whether anyone would be mad if I took a minute to pick up a sandwich, but I had no choice. I hadn’t eaten anything since my croissant at seven this morning, and it was nearly two. I asked the driver to pull over at a deli and decided at the last minute to get him one, too. His jaw dropped when I handed him the turkey and honey mustard, and I wondered if I had made him uncomfortable.

‘I just figured you were hungry, too,’ I said. ‘You know, driving around all day, you probably don’t have much time for lunch.’

‘Thank you, miss, I appreciate it. It’s just that I’ve been driving around Elias-Clark girls for twelve years, and they are not so nice. You are very nice,’ he said in a thick but indeterminate accent, looking at me in the rearview mirror. I smiled at him and felt a momentary flash of foreboding. But then the moment passed and we each munched our turkey wraps while sitting in gridlock and listening to his favorite CD, which sounded to me like little more than a woman shrieking the same thing over and over in an unknown language, the whole thing set to sitar music.

Emily’s next written instruction was to pick up a pair of white shorts that Miranda desperately needed for Pilates. I figured we’d be headed to Polo, but she had written Chanel. Chanel made work-out wear? The driver took me to the private salon, where an older saleswoman whose facelift had left her eyes looking like slits handed me a pair of white cotton-Lycra hot pants, size zero, pinned to a silk hanger and draped in a velvet garment bag. I looked at the shorts, which appeared as though they wouldn’t fit a six-year-old, and looked back to the woman.

‘Um, do you really think Miranda will wear these?’ I asked tentatively, convinced the woman could open that pit-bull mouth of hers and consume me whole. She glared at me.

‘Well, I should hope so, miss, considering they’re custom measured and cut, according to her exact specifications,’ she snarled as she handed the minishorts over. ‘Tell her Mr Kopelman sends his best.’ Sure, lady. Whoever that is.

My next stop was what Emily wrote as ‘way downtown,’ J&R Computer World near City Hall. Seemed it was the only store in the entire city that sold Warriors of the West, a computer game that Miranda wanted to purchase for Frederic and Marie-élise Marteau’s son, Maxime. By the time I made it downtown an hour later, I’d realized that the cell phone could make long-distance calls, and I was happily dialing my parents and telling them how great the job was.

‘Um, Dad? Hi, it’s Andy. Guess where I am now? Yes, of course I’m at work, but that happens to be in the backseat of a chauffeured car cruising around Manhattan. I’ve already been to Ralph Lauren and Chanel, and after I buy this computer game, I’m on my way to Frederic Marteau’s apartment on Park Avenue to drop all the stuff off. The incredibly famous designer! No, it’s not for him! Miranda’s in St Barth’s and Marie-élise is flying there to meet them all tonight. On a private plane, yes! Dad!’

He sounded wary but pleased that I was so happy, and I came to decide that I was hired as college-educated messenger. Which was absolutely fine with me. After leaving the bag of Ralph Lauren clothes, the hot pants, and the computer game with a very distinguished-looking doorman in a very plush Park Avenue lobby (so this is what people mean when they talk about Park Avenue!), I headed back to the Elias-Clark building. When I walked into my office area, Emily was sitting Indian-style on the floor, wrapping presents in plain white paper with white ribbons. She was surrounded by mountains of red-and-white boxes, all identical in shape, hundreds, perhaps thousands, scattered between our desks and overflowing into Miranda’s office. Emily was unaware that I was watching her, and I saw that it took her only two minutes to wrap each individual box perfectly and an additional fifteen seconds to tie on a white satin ribbon. She moved efficiently, not wasting a single second, piling the wrapped white boxes in new mountains behind her. The wrapped pile grew and grew, but the unwrapped pile didn’t shrink. I estimated that she could be at it for the next four days and still not finish.

I called her name over the eighties CD she had playing from her computer. ‘Um, Emily? Hi, I’m back.’

She turned toward me and for a brief moment appeared to have no idea who I was. Completely blank. But then my new-girl status came rushing back. ‘How’d it go?’ she asked quickly. ‘Did you get everything on the list?’

I nodded.

‘Even the video game? When I called, there was only one copy left. It was there?’