How I made the costumes for the West End hit The Devil Wears Prada — and why I don’t care about the criticism

It’s tricky to design the costumes for a show that is modern dress and, on top of that, uses fashion as the backdrop of the story. There is a lot of pressure to “get it right” but what that means exactly is hard to define.

We have set The Devil Wears Prada musical in 2005, but at the same time this is not a documentary of style from that year. We looked at a lot of editorial photos and fashion shows from the early Noughties and (as you would expect) there are things that take your breath away and also things that you shudder to remember. With The Devil Wears Prada my hope is that the audience will want to wear everything that is on the stage and never think “weren’t we wacky in 2005.”