Plum Sykes says millions of TikTok followers have decided she is the real-life inspiration for Emily in The Devil Wears Prada, and she is now pushing back on the theory after a cinema outing in London brought it back to her doorstep.
The writer says she first spoke up after a few weeks ago at the Everyman Cinema in Bayswater, when her daughter Tess shouted, “Mum! It’s you!” after seeing Emily Blunt in the trailer for DWP2. Sykes says Blunt appears in the trailer dressed head to toe in Dior, playing Emily, the hoity-toity English assistant to Miranda Priestly that millions online now believe was lifted from her own life.
Sykes, who has long been associated with the speculation, says the online theory grew out of a viral mix of a documentary, a novel and a movie that viewers connected after the fact. She says the original Vogue office was at 4 Times Square, and that a TV crew filmed a documentary called Boss Women about Anna Wintour there in the early 2000s. The show aired in England in 2003, the same year The Devil Wears Prada novel was published, before the movie followed in 2006.
That sequence has only deepened the public obsession. Sykes says newspaper articles later suggested Lauren Weisberger based the Emily character on her, helping fuel a story that has now found a new audience on TikTok two decades later, where clips from Boss Women have gone viral. She says the result is that millions of followers have become convinced the fictional assistant was not fictional at all.
The friction, though, is that Sykes says the version of Emily fans have attached to her does not fit. After Tess repeated what her schoolmates already say, Sykes answered, “What? But Emily was so mean. I’m not mean.” Her family was less interested in the distinction. “Own it, Plum,” Ernie told her. “It’s a flex to be Emily.”
Whether Sykes likes it or not, the speculation has escaped the screen and the page and settled into a new phase of its own. The trailer for DWP2 has only revived a theory that began with Anna Wintour’s office, spread through a novel and a hit movie, and now lives on because a new generation has decided the woman at the center of it should finally say whether the internet got it right.
