Is the Fashion Industry Really Like The Devil Wears Prada?

When I was working from the Condé Nast offices in 2015, I’d sit in the Vogue boardroom late at night, surrounded by garment bags, piles of sample returns, and the hum of fluorescent lights overhead. The boardroom itself was impossibly chic — dark wood, large boardroom table, and past Vogue issues framed on the walls — but the glamour was always undercut by the sheer chaos of sample returns. I'd be taping up boxes and organising sample receipts with The Devil Wears Prada playing on my laptop in the background. Meryl Streep’s icy delivery of “That’s all” would echo through the room while I folded a Dior coat into a DHL bag. And honestly? It felt oddly comforting.

Because here’s the thing — The Devil Wears Prada is both completely accurate and completely unrealistic.

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The Glamour vs. The Grind

Fashion does have a certain sheen of glamour. When you work in fashion, you do find yourself handling clothes worth more than your rent while standing next to a model whose face you’ve seen on billboards. There’s a thrill to walking into a showroom and pulling looks straight from the runway or getting last-minute access to an exclusive piece from PR.

But that’s only half of it. For every glamorous fashion show or celebrity fitting, there’s the unseen grind of hauling garment bags through the rain, dragging a suitcase up three flights of stairs because the lift is broken, and sweating through a sample return run while someone from PR passive-aggressively reminds you that the jacket was due back yesterday. I once spent an hour on the phone negotiating a missing Céline bag only to find out it had been sitting under a pile of other samples the entire time. The glamour and the chaos go hand in hand.

It’s not all front row seats and champagne — it’s also steaming clothes in a cramped studio at 6 AM because the shoot call time was pushed forward.

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