PRIMAL SCREAM

I Lived ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Sequel in Real Time

The real devil is in the details, it turns out. And I would know, because I saw the world of print magazines change first-hand.

Politics as theatre. Celebrity as currency. Wellness as religion. And power as the only real language in the room. Subscribe to PRIMAL SCREAM with Joanna Coles on Substack for exclusive news, reviews, and commentary.

The first time I saw The Devil Wears Prada, I felt a sense of professional vindication.

The movie opened barely a month after I arrived in New York to take over as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire, and, unlike the endless clichés about fashion magazines being silly, bitchy, or trivial, it captured something real: The electricity. The speed. The ambition. The absurd glamour (or was it the glamorous absurdity?) of it all.

Every morning, I ran around the Central Park Reservoir listening to Suddenly I See on repeat; the KT Tunstall song, from the movie’s soundtrack, had become the unofficial soundtrack of ambitious women everywhere. Then I’d go home, make breakfast for my two small sons, dispatch them to school, and climb back into a black car bound for the newly opened Hearst Tower, Norman Foster’s glittering glass cathedral to magazines.

Play Video

The tower itself opened the same week I slid into the editor’s chair. Stevie Wonder played the opening party. Everywhere you looked, there were beautiful young women carrying garment bags and coffee cups and impossible dreams. The jobs paid terribly compared to banking or law, but they were social gold dust. To work at a magazine in New York then was to possess cultural capital.

Click through to PRIMAL SCREAM to read Joanna Coles’ full analysis.