Two Emilys.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images, Jamie McCarthy/WireImage
It may be funny, but most people probably don’t want to be perceived as being as viciously mean as Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Today, stylist Leslie Fremar revealed that she is confident that she is the inspiration for the character “Emily” in the original Devil Wears Prada book by Lauren Weisberger. “I know I am,” she said on an episode of The Run-Through With Vogue. “Yes.” Fremar worked as Anna Wintour’s assistant above Weisberger and even hired the latter originally, but she has never come forward previously to claim the title. She’s incredibly confident it’s her because some lines were taken from her mouth. “I definitely told her a million girls would kill for the job,” Fremar said.
When the book came out in 2003, Fremar was working in the Vogue fashion department. “I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me, and my heart sunk,” Fremar said. “I was like, ‘She never would call in an assistant into her office.’ I was very taken aback by that. Then I went into her office, and she said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger?’ And I said, ‘She was your junior assistant, she was only here for a short period of time, maybe eight months.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.’” Fremar then received an early copy of the book, which was even meaner than the version that was eventually published. “I remember feeling like it was a betrayal at the time,” she said.
What’s different? “The fiction part of the book is that this character [Andy, Weisberger’s self-insert] turns into this superstar, and I did not witness that,” Fremar said. “This idea that the Emily character is not very pleasant or nice or seems high-strung is because 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.”
Since the book’s publication, Weisberger and Fremar have remained distant. “Her and I never talked about it,” Fremar said. “And we never talked again after she left.” If they met again, Fremar thinks “it would be very awkward.” Now, she’s a well-regarded stylist who works with Charlize Theron and even styled Kamala Harris for the cover of Vogue, which is not far off from the character Emily’s job in The Devil Wears Prada 2, working in luxury retail at Dior. But Fremar still never told anyone they should go to a “hideous skirt convention.”
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