Parties

Photographed by Hunter Abrams

“There would be no Devil Wears Prada without you,” Chloe Malle told a room at Metrograph that looked, for one night, as though the Vogue masthead of the last three decades had stepped off the page and taken their seats together in a movie theater. For the second Vogue Book Club gathering—this one devoted to Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada and paired with an advance screening of its long-awaited sequel—Malle had cleverly invited a particularly knowing audience: more than twenty of Anna Wintour’s former assistants, the “real Andy Sachses,” alongside designers, editors, and readers, many of them veterans of the very world Weisberger fictionalized.

What unfolded felt part book party, part oral history, part reunion. Wintour only ever had three assistants at a time, making the sight of so many former baton-holders in one room unusually rare. And what a room. Vera Wang, in an oversized gray blazer and red-tinted glasses—herself once an AW assistant—mingled with Caroline Palmer, whose Workhorse offers a rather un-veiled account of her own years at Vogue; Indre Rockefeller, Claiborne Swanson Frank, Cynthia Smith, and other alumni embraced with the warmth of people who had survived a shared institution.

Cocktails began at five across Metrograph’s two floors amid lush flowers, trays of sliders and hors d’oeuvres, and a full bar whose cocktail and mocktail menu was laced with Devil Wears Prada jokes—including a spirit-free concoction dubbed the Devil Wears Nada. With thanks to Samsung Galaxy and support from Tiffany & Co., the evening carried no shortage of thoughtful flourishes: popcorn came in trompe l’oeil cartons disguised as the novel’s cover, while guests stepped into the Samsung Photo Activation with Samsung Galaxy, posing with placards riffing on favorite lines (“Everybody Wants to Be Us” among them), though former assistant Carolina Gonzalez used the occasion to make the reunion feel even more like one, proudly scrawling her own: “AW assistant class of 2020–2023.”

There were designers in the mix too. Tanner Fletcher’s Tanner Richie and Fletcher Kassel were discussing Met plans involving no shortage of handcraft, while Richie confessed, to great amusement, “Oh, I was nine when the movie came out”—a remark that landed especially well in a room full of people who had, in one form or another, lived it. Nearby, Batsheva Hay lifted a copy from a display of Weisberger novels, laughing, “I don’t know if these are giveaways, but it’s for my daughter!”—and just like that, another generation is introduced to Miranda Priestly.

And naturally, the designers turned out too: Domenico Dolce, whose house occupies a memorable place in both the original film and the sequel, mingled with Prabal Gurung, while Grace Coddington and Tonne Goodman held court nearby; Soull and Dynasty Ogun were among those in the mix as well. It was a reminder that the glamorous cast orbiting Runway on the page was never all that far from the real thing.

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Lilah Ramzi is a fashion historian and has been an editor at Vogue since 2013. Before she joined the magazine, Ramzi worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute and the Council of Fashion Designers of America. A lover of Dior’s New Look, Ramzi can most often be found ... Read More