She was the girl who wrote the book which became the film. She had Anne Hathaway playing her, Meryl Streep playing her tyrannical boss, and a world aghast at the, let's face it, sheer ghastliness of what life was really like in the fickle world of fashion magazines.
If revenge is sweet, then for Lauren Weisberger it was a double spoonful as her debut novel catapulted into the New York Times' bestseller list, was translated into 27 different languages and sold to 31 countries, before the film adaptation went on to gross more than $300 million worldwide.
The Devil Wears Prada was the story of a young girl, fresh out of university, working in New York as an assistant to a fashion magazine editor who possessed a frosty leadership style.
When she wrote it, Lauren had just left her job after 11 months as an assistant to American Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who possesses such a frosty leadership style she is known as Nuclear Wintour.
Seven years on and Lauren still looks a touch shell-shocked by the commotion she caused. 'I don't think anyone can ever be prepared for that level of attention,' she says.
'I was just excited that someone wanted to publish the book and that I could tell my family they could actually buy it in a store. But for it to sell and have it made into a film, too, was a complete whirlwind for which I wasn't prepared.'
Tall with coltish limbs and long blonde hair, 33-year-old Lauren does not physically resemble the darkly beautiful Hathaway. But wearing the tiniest trace of makeup, she looks like she's just stepped out of a Gap advert.
She plonks herself down at the table in the cool but not-too-cool Pastis restaurant in New York's Meatpacking District, looking most definitely not a part of the high-gloss Devil Wears Prada world.
Her jeans and sweater have been selected on the basis of comfort rather than label and the only vestige of the high fashion world she briefly inhabited comes in the shape of the Chanel sunglasses perched on her head.
She corrects the assumption that Hathaway was playing her - 'she was playing Andy, the character in my book' - but the parallels between Lauren's tenure on Vogue (in 1999 and 2000) and Andy's stint on the fictional Runway magazine are too delicious to ignore.
In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs, a smalltown girl, lands a job as PA to Miranda Priestly (played by Streep).
Miranda - the stick-thin, steak-eating editor of top-selling New York fashion magazine Runway - is by turns capricious, thoughtlessly cruel, wildly extravagant and demanding, dismissing minions not with a 'Thank you' but with an abrupt: 'That's all.'
So terrifying is she that no one will ride in the lift with her and she issues impossible demands to her brow-beaten (though immaculately attired) staff.
As her new assistant, Andy forms a friendship of sorts with Miranda's senior assistant Emily (played by Emily Blunt) and though her job is fraught (the endless latte runs to Starbucks in high heels; the constant worrying about her weight when compared to the sylph-like beauties who populate the office), Andy also benefits from the perks of the job such as taking her pick of the designer clothes in Runway's heaving fashion cupboard.
When Emily gets sick, it is Andy whom Miranda commandeers to accompany her to the prestigious Paris fashion shows. But after realising that the more she has blended into Runway's world the further she has moved away from her real life, in particular her boyfriend, Andy gives up her job and, in that highly American fashion, becomes true to herself once more.
Though Lauren has over the years remained tight-lipped about her time working at Vogue for Anna Wintour (stick-thin, steak-eating and with a nickname like Nuclear Wintour, probably not the chummiest of bosses to work for), today she is in a more relaxed mode.
'It wasn't a one-to-one portrayal [of Wintour],' she says. 'But of course my time at Vogue informed the book, there's no denying that.'
Lauren, like Andy, would never have dreamed of getting in the lift with her boss, and though terribly slim, she still felt dumpy next to her pin-thin Vogue colleagues, saying: 'I knew I was tall and thin, but I was short and fat there.'
Where she differed from Andy was that she 'never got to raid the closet because I never had time, although the other girls did and they wore the most fabulous things to parties. And I never went to Paris. French Vogue provided Anna with assistants when she was over there.
'And unlike Andy I couldn' t force myself to wear high heels. It was expected of me, but I ran all day, all over the office, up and down the building 1,000 times and to Starbucks six times a day, so there was no way I could manage even a 2in heel.
'I wore these horrible, black platform boots with a thick rubber sole because there was no choice. And even though for a couple of weeks I made the boot-to-high-heels switch under my desk, I just had to forget it in the end. She would stare at them in disgust and it was a stare that conveyed her displeasure pretty clearly.'
The 'she', in this instance, is pretty self-explanatory.
'People have said it was "boss betrayal", but that wasn't what it was. I worked there for a year and it was a hell of a year - crazy, exciting and hard.
'I left the job to work for a travel magazine and took a writing class at night. I'd had this crazy work experience which not a lot of people had had, so I wanted to write all the stuff down that was in my head. I hadn't even intended for it to be a book.
'When it was published, people kept saying "It's so brave of you to write this", but it wasn't bravery - it was stupidity and complete naivety. I didn't think anyone would read it, let alone have an opinion on it. Had I known about all the fuss that would ensue, I would have been paralysed. But people attributed things to the book that I hadn't intended.'
Still, her tenure at Vogue certainly provided Lauren with ample writing material. 'The strangest thing about my time there? Wow, how can I pick?' she grins.
' How they believed it was acceptable to show their midriff in the workplace and how they'd come in to work wearing leather trousers, stiletto heels and furry tops [Lauren, it must be said, hails from rural Pennsylvania].
'They wore the most outrageous outfits and even though they all
looked fabulous in them, it was hard to think of any other corporation where that would have been acceptable. They'd go to the filing cabinet dripping in jewels and even though I was there for almost a year, that aspect of the job continued to amaze me.'
Was there ever any comeback from Wintour or her people?
'No, not a thing. But what sent the biggest message of all was that silence. The book was getting so much hype and so much publicity, but not a single Conde Nast publication [Vogue is published by Conde Nast] mentioned a word - not my name, the title, anything, and that pretty much told me where they stood on that.'
So popular was The Devil Wears Prada that when The September Issue - a film documentary following the real goings-on at American Vogue - was released last year, many believed that Anna Wintour had only agreed to be the subject of the film in order to mitigate the reputation she had acquired since Devil.
The September Issue showed Wintour opening her doors and - shocker! - smiling. 'And it was a surprise to me, too, when I saw the movie,' says Lauren, 'because I did not see those things when I was there.
'I went to see it with my husband and it was amazing how much everything looked the same, even though I hadn't worked there for years. Anna's office looked the same and the people were the same - so much so that I started getting cold sweats from the flashbacks! I was shaking by the time I left the cinema!'
She says the book's success gave her the opportunity to write full time. Her new novel, Last Night At Chateau Marmont, out this week, is an equally zippy read.
It follows the fortunes of a young couple whose lives change when the husband, for years a struggling musician, hits the big time, leaving his wife to cope not only with the change in dynamic of their relationship, but also with the emergence of an incriminating photo featuring her husband and a young girl.
It is a dynamic Lauren is unfamiliar with personally (she has been married to playwright Mike Cohen for two years and they are expecting their first child in December): 'But I'm an avid reader of gossip magazines and I've always wondered what it feels like for the spouse in that kind of relationship, when they themselves aren't famous.'
The 'civilian' in the relationship must get quizzed constantly about their spouse in much the same way Lauren is constantly asked about The Devil Wears Prada, 'but I can't be anything but flattered by that,' she adds graciously.
'The movie brought it to a new level and even though as a writer you're not supposed to like how they interpret your story on film, I loved it and thought it was spot-on.
Anne Hathaway was just wonderful and Meryl Streep, well, what can you say? I hadn't envisaged her originally - not that I had envisaged anyone for the role - but she was as good as it gets.'
Lauren even got to film a teeny cameo in The Devil Wears Prada as the nanny to Miranda's twins - a cameo she admits now she is 'hard-pressed to locate after several viewings'. 'But I was on set all the time during the making of the film and they were very inclusive,' she says, 'even giving me a chair with my name on it. It was such a once-in-a-lifetime thing and so removed from my normal life.
'I'm the type of person who watches American Idol in my pyjamas. This kind of thing doesn't happen to me.'
Before the film was released, Lauren and Anna Wintour attended the same preview screening, 'I was blissfully unaware until people told me afterwards. Honestly though, I do not exist in her world.
'We don't travel in the same circles, we don't run into each other and she would not be able to pick me out from a crowd of three. And I'm very, very comfortable with that.'
And what would Lauren say to Wintour should they ever bump into one another? She smiles slowly and says nothing. What more, quite frankly, needs to be said?
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