WEISBERGER
Lauren

• 1. Career
• 1.1. Vogue magazine
• 1.2. Departures magazine
• 1.3. The Devil Wears Prada

Lauren Weisberger is an American writer and author of the 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a roman à clef of her experience as an assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Weisberger worked as a writer and editor for Vogue and Departures magazines prior to authoring The Devil Wears Prada, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2006. She has since published seven other novels.

Career

Vogue magazine

After returning to the United States following her backpacking expedition, Weisberger settled in Manhattan, where she was hired as assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour. After ten months, she and Vogue features editor Richard Story left the magazine. Weisberger said she felt out of place at the magazine, though Vogue managing editor Laurie Jones later said, "She seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman".

Departures magazine

Weisberger and Story began working for Departures, an American Express publication, where she wrote 100-word reviews and became an assistant editor. She also published a 2004 article in Playboy magazine.

After mentioning her interest in writing classes to Story, he referred her to his friend Charles Salzberg. She started writing a story about her time at Vogue, and completed it by trying to write 15 pages every couple of weeks. After repeated urgings, she showed the finished work to agents; it sold within two weeks.

The Devil Wears Prada

Weisberger's first book, The Devil Wears Prada, was published by Broadway Books in 2003; it spent six months on The New York Times Best Seller List. By July 2006, The Devil Wears Prada was the best-selling mass-market softcover book in the nation, according to Publishers Weekly.

The Devil Wears Prada is a semi-fictional but highly critical book on the Manhattan elite, and is largely based on Weisberger's experience at Vogue magazine. The book's primary character Miranda Priestly is believed to represent Wintour and the fictional Elias-Clark publishing company in the book is believed to be modeled on Condé Nast. The book focuses on many comical aspects of a first job in the world of elite fashion.

While commercially successful, the book was not well received at Vogue. Kate Betts, a Vogue editor, criticized Weisberger and the book in The New York Times, writing that Weisberger and Wintour are actually the direct counterparts of their fictional characters. "Andrea is just as much a snob as the snobs she is thrown in with," Betts wrote in April 2003.