How Does The Devil Wears Prada Fare In The West End? Hamish Bowles Reports

For those of you who relished the 2006 movie, there are some keynotes that you will recognise. Who can forget Miranda’s diatribe on cerulean blue? (It’s captured here with all Miss Williams’s steely focus.) And Andy must lay hands on the latest (unpublished) Harry Potter book, so that Miranda’s twins will have their curiosities satisfied, or face the sack. Will she, won’t she? Luckily, the suave Christian (James Darch), whom she met in her earlier, frumpy look (going unnoticed by him at the time), has the answer.

Then there is the sensational gala at the end of act one. Nigel escorts Miranda to the ball, where the guests are in devilish, funereal black and crepuscular carmine, and I don’t know where they are going dressed like that, but I’d rather not go. Miranda, however, wears a sheath of strident red skin-tight sequins, with a crimson damask coat arranged just so over her shoulders. (Miss Williams’s important clothes are fashioned by Pamella Roland.) Poor Nigel doesn’t have time to change from his office look, but he does get to don a marvellous trained opera coat with glittering edges over his office-appropriate-but-black-tie-suitable black and rust ombré jumper.

That opera coat, by the way, has more than a hint of André Leon Talley, the legendary and lamented onetime Vogue editor, about it. So too does Nigel’s song, “Seen”, about growing up in Kalamazoo and turning from the bullies towards the faces in Runway magazine: “Seen, finally seen, crowned as prince by the fashion queen… Runway lets me express to the world the way I want to be seen…” But there the resemblance, alas, ends.)

It is 2006-ish, and so the fashion world is geared towards that other city of dreams, with its clothes and designers: Paris. The Eiffel Tower rises in the background, just outside Andy’s (quite astonishing) bedroom window. (How does she get to stay in a magnificent suite at a Paris hotel with a wardrobe of couture? Well, this is all fantasy, after all.) The audience has to cling on for dear life: Andy’s rollercoaster life is moving faster than fast. Nate is left behind. How will it all turn out?

At the time The Devil Wears Prada hit bookshelves, I was a dozen years into my Vogue life. Working at Vogue, I was kissed with absolute magic. But as it turns out, I was a very long way from the world of Runway.