Celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar revealed that she’s the inspiration behind The Devil Wears Prada’s Emily Charlton.
Fremar opened up about learning that the character Emily was based on her while chatting with Chloe Malle during a Tuesday, April 28, episode of Vogue’s “Run-Through” podcast. “I am Emily,” she said while discussing the 2003 book by Lauren Weisberger.
She recalled hiring and working with Weisberger, 49, and telling her “a million girls would kill for the job,” which was famously turned into a quote in the 2006 movie, starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt.
“That was definitely my line because I actually really believed that, and I knew that she didn’t necessarily wanna be there,” Fremar added.
Weisberger apparently sent an early copy of the book to Anna Wintour, who was believed to be the inspiration behind the wildly successful yet icy Runway magazine editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly in the book, played by Streep, 76, in the film. Fremar didn’t learn about the book until after she stopped working at Vogue.
“I got a call from Anna’s office saying that she wanted to see me. I was petrified,” she recalled. “[Wintour] said, ‘Who’s Lauren Weisberger? And I said, ‘She was your junior assistant. She was only here for 8 months. And she’s like, ‘Well, she wrote a book about us, and you’re worse than me.'”
“I wanted to ask more questions, but you can’t really ask her that many questions,” Fremar continued. “I was like, ‘OK?’ She let me read it. It was actually quite mean and I think an editor came in and really softened it.”
Fremar said the original copy felt “quite dark” and didn’t have a “lightness to it,” which the final copy did. “I found that quite hurtful,” she said. “I remember feeling like it was a betrayal at the time. People weren’t very public about their jobs. You just didn’t talk about it.”
“It just felt like this exposure,” Fremar said. “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.”
Fremar immediately knew the book was about herself because Weisberger “didn’t really socialize with anyone else” at Vogue. “I think her experience was really with me and with Anna,” she explained, noting that she and Weisberger have not seen each other in 20 years.
“I think it would be very awkward,” Fremar said. “I don’t hold a grudge towards her but it became something that — there’s nothing to be said.”
As for what was fiction and not, Fremar shared that Weisberger was indeed “a fish out of water” in the office. “I think she felt the tasks at hand were below her. I think the fashion part of it did not interest her.”
Fremar also actually did change her shoes when Wintour arrived at the office and changed out of her Birkenstocks and into heels, which Wintour caught her for.
“The fiction part of the book is this character turns into this superstar and I did not witness that,” Fremar said of Weisberger’s character Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Hathaway, 43. “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,” Fremar added. “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.”
Fremar, who has styled Charlize Theron, Hailey Bieber, Nicole Kidman and more, also shared that she met Blunt, 43, and revealed herself as the real-life Emily.
“I said to her, I was like, ‘I just need to let you know, I’m Emily,’” Fremar shared. “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.’”
As for the movie, Fremar said she separated herself and “enjoyed” watching it.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits theatres on Friday, May 1.
