Revenge Wears Prada ‘gets fashion all wrong’

Revenge Wears Prada ‘gets fashion all wrong’

The sequel to The Devil Wears Prada is now out in US bookstores. But are representations of the fashion world in popular culture selling us a false image?

When Lauren Weisberger’s Revenge Wears Prada landed on my desk, I was wary. I’ve never read The Devil Wears Prada, Weisberger’s bestselling roman à clef about her time as an assistant to Anna Wintour. But like a lot of people who work in fashion, the novel has dogged me.

When, for instance, I run into high school acquaintances, the first thing they ask when I say that I’m a fashion editor is whether my life is just like The Devil Wears Prada. “How so?” I ask. They then articulate some vision of a fashion industry comprised entirely of skinny girls in stiletto heels, catty gay men, and Wintour-ish bosses with ice picks for hearts. Look, I say, for the umpteenth time: There’s some truth to those stereotypes, but for the most part, the people who do well in the fashion industry are sharp, incredibly creative, and above all, very, very hard-working.

There are enough pop culture phenomena that traffic an image of fashion as a pit of campy vipers. As far back as the 1957 film Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn, fashion folk have been portrayed as peerless superficialists – people who care only for the glamorous and the new. In Funny Face, at least, the parody was cheerful. British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous came at the topic with daggers drawn, and while its satire was often apt, no one mistook it for reality.

Whereas today, ‘reality’ fashion programming creates all manner of confusion, inasmuch as the people on those shows create caricatures of themselves. Think of Heidi Klum on Project Runway, doing Wintour lite with her dry “Auf Wiedersehen” dismissal of losers. Or Rachel Zoe, who acts – on her eponymous TV show, at least – as though being a simpering diva were some kind of qualification for fashion industry success. Trust me: It’s not.