“I know I am, yes. I am Emily.”
So says Leslie Fremar, outing herself as the real-life inspiration for Emily, the uptight first assistant to fictional magazine editor Miranda Priestly. Emily is played in the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” and its new sequel by actor Emily Blunt.
Fremar went on the record in a podcast that dropped Wednesday, talking with Chloe Malle on Vogue’s “The Run-Through” just before “The Devil Wears Prada 2” hits theaters.
A Toronto native who started at Vogue and, ironically, worked for a while as director of celebrity relations at Prada, Fremar is now stylist to celebrities including Charlize Theron, Jennifer Connelly and Julianne Moore. But in 1999, she was in her first job, assisting the magazine’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, and helping to train the woman who would ultimately write the novel that became the film.
Not that she would be able to chit-chat pleasantly with Leslie Weisberger now if “The Devil Wears Prada” novelist were to walk into the room.
“I think it would be very awkward,” Fremar said on the podcast. “I mean, I don’t hold a grudge towards her, but it’s just, it became something that I don’t think she knew that I knew. And so I think it would just — there’s nothing to be said.”
Fremar, who moved into the magazine’s fashion department after being Wintour’s junior and then first assistant, found out about the book when the editor in chief called her into the office and asked her, “Who’s Leslie Weisberger?” Fremar said she reminded Wintour that Weisberger had been her second assistant for about eight months.
Wintour replied, “Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.”
The Vogue editor — she’s since been elevated to chief content officer for Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue — gave the galley, a pre-publication version of the book, to her former assistant to read.
“It was actually quite mean, the galley, and I think obviously an editor came in [later] and really softened it. … It felt quite dark, I remember thinking, and I found that quite hurtful,” Fremar told Malle. “I think what got put into the world is a much lighter, nicer version of what she actually wrote. … I remember feeling like it was a betrayal.”
Ouch.
But Fremar owned her part in inspiring the Emily character, saying, “I think 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. So for me, that was really frustrating.”
Fremar guessed that Weisberger, who made it known she wanted to be a writer and had been told by Condé Nast HR to take a certain writing class, “was probably just sitting there writing a book and not necessarily taking the job as seriously as I did. Or you know, a hundred million girls would. So I think that that probably created some tension in the office where maybe I would snap at her. … She just didn’t wanna play the game.”
As for the movie, Fremar said that its “fantasy element” made it possible for her to enjoy it as entertainment, rather than the galley that stung her feelings. But their time working together was real life.
“I think I was always trying to remind her that this was something to take seriously or I took it seriously. And she really didn’t. So that really frustrated me,” Fremar said. “I was like, this is a huge international business. This is like an art form to lots of people. People get dressed every day as an expression of like who they are. I took that seriously even though, you know, obviously I know I’m not curing anything. It was important to me. Not being important to her just really irked me.”
Anybody not seeing and hearing Emily Blunt in their mind at this moment is clearly not a “Prada” fan. Though the stylist’s accent is only slightly Canadian, not British at all.
Fremar credits her time working under Wintour for setting up the career she’s enjoyed since then, calling the editor her “mentor through and through.”
“I learned everything that I know from Anna. I would actually give her full credit for the way that my life turned out. And I’m very happy with how my life turned out. So I’m very grateful to Anna,” she said. “I think the way she ran her office without it feeling personal, I still do that to this day.”
Plus, Wintour brought her back to Vogue ahead of the Biden administration to style her first-ever cover of the mother ship magazine, which featured Kamala Harris, then vice president-elect, and brought things full circle.
But the stylist has the receipts that prove she is the Emily to Wintour’s Miranda. Requests for things that weren’t available — say, an unpublished “Harry Potter” manuscript, if the timing were right — really did happen at Vogue in the aughts. Yes, Wintour ate rare steak and potatoes from a nearby restaurant. Yes, the assistants would handle Wintour’s dry cleaning. And yes, “it was such panic” before she arrived at the office. But no, neither assistant ever accompanied Wintour to Paris for Fashion Week.
Anna always traveled solo, she said, and was aided by a woman from the magazine’s Paris office once she got there. “Fiona,” Malle said, is still on the job in France.
And although Wintour has had many assistants, Fremar said she’s publicly tagging herself as that assistant 20 years after the first film came out because “there’s all this speculation, everyone really enjoyed the movie, Anna’s clearly embracing it. And so why not? You know, just put it out there.”
“I’m not really worried about the repercussions. … That stuff really doesn’t bother me.”
Plus maybe, just maybe, it’s an opportunity for her to claim authorship of one of the original movie’s most well-known lines.
“I definitely told [Weisberger] a million girls would kill for the job. … That was definitely my line ’cause I actually really believed that,” Fremar said. “And I knew that she didn’t necessarily wanna be there.”
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