Where Angels Fear to Tread

By WOODY HOCHSWENDER
July 13, 2006; Page D10

Is the cutthroat world depicted in the film "The Devil Wears Prada" real?

This is what my nonfashion acquaintances, especially my teenage daughter's friends, keep asking me. They especially want to know if the villain of the piece, Miranda Priestly, the editor in chief of Runway magazine, is really like Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, whose former assistant, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the book on which the movie is based.

To me, the Miranda character, as played with wintry hauteur by Meryl Streep, does not personally resemble Ms. Wintour, aside from being a bit of a cool cookie and ridiculously well organized. Ms. Streep's pitch-perfect portrayal of Miranda is sui generis, with a dramatic existence of its own, as unique and memorable as, say, a Bette Davis character. This represents the summit of the actor's art, the ability to conjure a fictional being with just enough dead-on extraneous details to be entirely convincing. The character seems oddly familiar -- even to veterans of the fashion business.

 
While the character played by Meryl Streep (right) in 'The Devil Wears Prada' does not closely resemble Anne Wintour, she seems oddly familiar to fashion-business veterans.
Ms. Streep's Miranda Priestly seems to have inhaled the same air as a number of well-known fashion editors, including Ms. Wintour and my neighbor Polly Mellen, the silver-haired onetime fashion director of Vogue, who was legendary for her imperial fashion presence. The character also calls to mind Grace Mirabella, Ms. Wintour's predecessor at Vogue, who, during her long tenure as editor of the magazine, was the object of intense awe and groveling.

Once, long ago, I modeled for a special men's section of Vogue and was struck by the way all the women, some of them fully grown and well educated, referred to her in whispers as "Miss Mirabella." They literally scattered in the halls, just as in the movie, whenever she entered or emerged from her royal chamber, and darted about muttering restlessly, "Miss Mirabella wants the white shirt, not the blue one...." Or, "Miss Mirabella said to use the flats, not the pumps...."

In all matters material, ethereal, animal and vegetable, from the cheetah spots on the skirts and the airbrushing of the celebrity's thighs to the selection of canapés at a gala affair, the editor is the major general. Everything becomes an expression of his or her ultimate taste. Tyranny of this kind is fungible and applies to most magazines that emphasize style (including some that don't -- for example, the New Yorker during the boa-constrictor regime of William Shawn). On each fashion shoot, in every editorial meeting, at every run-through, someone has to be the decisive voice, the one to say, "not this -- that." There is too much louche creativity flying around the room for any other approach.

This reign of aesthetic terror, this sense of absolute rule by a single, driven person, also stems, I think, from two fundamental causes arising from a peculiar milieu:

1) The relative size of the fashion magazines, with their hundreds of monthly editorial pages needed to abut and sustain the advertising, results in a concomitant frenzy to make last-minute order out of chaos. This requires the editor on top to be ruthless, peremptory and supremely organized in order to meet deadlines. Precisely because the decisions in fashion are relatively whimsical and arbitrary -- the gray skirt, not the blue one; the teardrop earrings, not the studs -- the dictatorial element is much more profound and necessary.

2) The staff at such magazines is largely made up of fashionable, leggy, well-bred, socially adept young women who might not otherwise be gainfully employed, most with a taste for ribald fun and mischief, like private-school girls itching to cause mayhem. Many of them are somewhat dissolute.

Therefore editors of fashion rags consistently play the role of mean headmasters or headmistresses, with a vast repertoire of little humiliations at hand, like a riding crop, to keep their coltish minions in line. Anthony Mazzola, my boss at Harper's Bazaar in the 1980s, was a lot like a headmaster at a private girls' school. (Yes, the devil also wears Brioni.) Girls who were tardy, who didn't have the right answer, or who lost their homework (for example, $35,000 in fur and jewelry stolen from a shoot) were brutally dressed down in front of their peers. Even so, they still lost clothes, handed in blurry film and were caught FedEx-ing bricks of hashish from exotic locations to their boyfriends in New York.

Not surprisingly, the chief editor at a fashion magazine is often perceived as not very nice. (There may be a karmic convergence between not-so-nice people and top jobs in general, but that mystery cannot be solved here.) Fashion redefines or restyles our conventional definitions of "nice." The people who are nicest to your face are sometimes not averse to stabbing you in the back. On the other hand, someone who takes the time to snap that your trousers make your butt look big may actually be doing you a favor. Good medicine is harsh to the taste.

In my own experience, Ms. Wintour has always been gracious, tactful and fair. Her assistants always seemed as happy and chirpy as birds. Does that mean she is "nice"? Perhaps not by the standards of the people who live outside that hermetic little world, where all the tiny despotisms of fashion make its priestesses seem like gargoyles of insensitivity. That is exactly why "The Devil Wears Prada" plays so well in the middle of the country. It gives us an understandable villain with no political baggage at a time when such characters are scarce.

It is rare for a movie to achieve verisimilitude about the fashion world. What makes this one universal is its fable of a young person starting out in the big city. First jobs are often ordeals by fire. A difficult boss can burn you, but he or she can also temper you, as iron is forged into steel. The nicest people, by taking you exactly as you are, allow you to stay as you are, with all your weaknesses. From this standpoint, Ms. Weisberger, whose best-selling novel is somewhat more bitter in tone than the film, should be filled with eternal gratitude and appreciation for her time at Vogue.

Mr. Hochswender, a former features editor of Harper's Bazaar and style reporter for the New York Times, is the author of "The Buddha in Your Rearview Mirror," to be published this winter by Stewart, Tabori & Chang.



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