For nearly two decades, The Devil Wears Prada has lived rent-free in our heads as the ultimate fashion-meets-office-horror story. One of the reasons why the film is truly terrifying is because the viewer is well aware that these fictional icy characters are based on actual humans, including the scene-stealing Emily, played by Emily Blunt.
Well, buckle your belts (although which one? It’s a tough call, they’re so different…), because the woman widely believed to be the real-life inspiration behind Emily has finally stepped into the spotlight, and she’s got thoughts.
Who is Emily in The Devil Wears Prada based on?
In a chat with Vogue’s The Run-Through — how apt, the very magazine Runway is based on — celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar has revealed she’s the real-life inspo behind Emily, the perpetually stressed assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, and workplace frenemy to Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, all of whom reprise their roles in the sequel.
ICYMI, Lauren Weisberger dropped the best-selling novel that The Devil Wears Prada is based on more than 20 years ago, drawing from her time as a junior assistant to Vogue HBIC Anna Wintour and the real-world blueprint for Miranda Priestly. Fun twist? Fremar actually hired Weisberger, and the pair worked closely together for eight months.
“I definitely told her a million girls would kill for the job,” Fremar revealed. “That was definitely my line because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily wanna be there.”
Despite inspiring the Emily character in the book, Leslie Fremar said she had no idea it even existed until after she’d already left her role working for Anna Wintour at Vogue.
“I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me,” Fremar recalled. “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’.”
Fremar added that the original copy of the book was “quite mean” but eventually “softened”. “It just felt like this exposure. 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,” she added.
Since her Runway, I mean, Vogue days, Leslie Fremar has carved out a high-profile career as a celeb stylist, working with A-listers like Charlize Theron and Julianne Moore. In 2022, she also styled Nicola Peltz for her wedding to Brooklyn Beckham and helped secure the Valentino wedding gown (yes, that one).
Reflecting on her time working with Weisberger, who she claims “didn’t really socialise with anyone else”, Fremar said, “I probably was not very nice, and I probably was high-strung because I felt like I was having to do her job as well. So for me, that was really frustrating. I think she was probably just sitting there writing a book and not necessarily taking the job as seriously as I did.”
The two women “never spoke again” after Lauren Weisberger left Vogue, and if they were to cross paths now, Fremar admits it’d be “very awkward”.
And finally, Fremar discussed Emily Blunt’s portrayal of her, telling the pod she did actually connect with the actress and told her she was the inspiration behind the character, but the reaction wasn’t exactly what she’d hoped for. “She was not that interested, to be honest. I thought I was gonna get this, like, huge reaction. Like, no. It was like, ‘Oh, OK’.”
How very… Emily of her.
It’s unsurprising that Blunt was, erm, blunt with Fremar, given that she told PEDESTRIAN.TV she considers Emily to be the true villain of the film.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits cinemas today!
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