This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.Andrea? Not Anymore. Whatever Happened to The Devil Wears Prada Author Lauren Weisberger?

Chloe JoeFri, May 1, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC

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What is Lauren Weisberger Doing Now?Getty; 20th Century Studios

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On some level, it’s surprising that Lauren Weisberger isn’t a household name. She not only wrote The Devil Wears Prada—which has sold millions of copies—but went on to pen more bestsellers, ultimately publishing eight books, including a Devil Wears Prada sequel, Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, and a spin-off, When Life Gives You Lululemons. No small feat. But somehow, the author herself isn’t as immediately recognizable as the characters she’s created. With the second Devil film landing in theaters this weekend, it’s curious to think that the woman who created the franchise hasn’t spent more time in the spotlight. “She's almost been more elusive than Anna [Wintour],” says Amy Odell, author of Anna: The Biography and fashion newsletter Back Row.

It’s not that she’s been in hiding. Weisberger spent many years in Greenwich, Connecticut, writing her novels and raising the two children she shares with her husband, playwright and screenwriter Mike Cohen. As she recently revealed in an essay for Vogue, she and her family uprooted their lives during COVID, moving onto a boat and traveling the world, and never looked back. She’s continuing to write from her unconventional new digs; her ninth novel is in the works.

It’s a quiet life, and she seems to like it that way. “I'm the type of person who watches American Idol in my pajamas,” she once told the Daily Mail, explaining why she hadn’t crossed paths with Wintour since her days at Vogue; on the prospect of appealing on TV, Weisberger confessed to The Independent, “I still get nervous on a Zoom call.” Mighty shy, for the woman who pulled back the curtain on Vogue.

When Weisberger first entered Vogue’s hallowed halls in 1999, Wintour was at the height of her powers. “It was the era of celebrity editors, where people like Anna Wintour, their comings and goings and exploits were chronicled in the gossip pages as much as any movie star. There was a lushness and an opulence to the lives of these editors that really captured people's imaginations—the access to the most beautiful clothing, the five-star hotels, the trips to Paris,” says Michael M. Grynbaum, author of Empire of the Elite (coming out soon in paperback, with new reporting about Wintour).

Lauren Weisberger around the 2003 release of The Devil Wears Prada.Myung J. Chun - Getty Images

Weisberger, meanwhile, was a 22-year-old Cornell grad and aspiring magazine writer. Admittedly, her resume wasn’t particularly impressive—as she told The Guardian, she’d “literally never had a job beyond working in a frozen yogurt place, with a bit of babysitting and lifeguarding”—but an HR rep at Conde plucked her application from the pile and called her in. Hours after that first-round interview, Weisberger was sitting across from Wintour. She got the gig. “Anna needed an assistant like around the holidays, so not a great time to hire assistants,” Odell says. “Lauren Weisberger came in [and] she checked the boxes.”

So began what Weisberger has described as her “year of being yelled at.” “I would wake up every morning to voicemails left overnight, endless tasks that all needed to be done right away,” she told The Guardian. “Every minute in that office felt like an emergency. I was just a kid. I went into survival mode.” Her memories of the madness stayed with her; in 2010, she confessed to having “cold sweats from the flashbacks” when watching the Vogue documentary, The September Issue.

It didn’t help that what Weisberger really wanted to do was write, and she wasn’t able to secure many assignments for the magazine. (In Anna, Odell quotes former Vogue managing editor Laurie Jones saying Weisberger was “a lovely girl” but “not a great writer, poor thing.”)

Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger.Macall Polay

After 11-odd months, she jumped ship to assist an editor at Departures, who eventually recommended she take writing classes. It was in those classes that she began to write about her time at Vogue, mostly as a way to process the experience. If Weisberger didn’t recognize she was sitting on gold, her writing teacher did and hooked her up with representation. “I met my agent, and she loved it, even though it was just a series of 15- or 20-page anecdotes, fun things that I was writing just for the hell of it,” Weisberger told Publisher’s Weekly. “She sold it a week later.”

It’s safe to say, Weisberger didn’t understand what she was getting into when she published The Devil Wears Prada. “When it was published, people kept saying, ‘It's so brave of you to write this,’ but it wasn't bravery—it was stupidity and complete naivety. I didn't think anyone would read it, let alone have an opinion on it,” Weisberger told TODAY.

Her sizable advance, reportedly $250,000 ($459,139 in today’s dollars), could’ve tipped her off to the idea that her novel might sell more than a few copies. Or that executives at Fox bought the rights before publication, after reading only the first 100 pages and an outline, per Variety. Or that all of this was covered breathlessly by Page Six. Remember, in those days, the public couldn’t get enough gossip about the goings-on at Vogue—and Weisberger was about to deliver a deluge. “It was like, ‘wow, like, she's really taking a big swing,’” Odell says of Weisberger. “[Anna’s] still powerful, but at that time she was just untouchable.”

Odell reports that when Wintour first heard about the book, she had trouble remembering who Weisberger was. Once it was published, Wintour took it on the chin but some Vogue editors were upset on her behalf. In a memorable review for the New York Times, a former staffer dismissed the novel as “callow.” Other critics were similarly harsh, with the Wall Street Journal decreeing it “could have been written by a window washer.”

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Compared to Meryl Streep’s portrayal of the Wintour-esque Miranda Priestly in the two Devil films, Weisberger admits, the book’s version of Priestly is “cold” and “pretty one-dimensional.” But she maintains that she didn’t intend the book to be a takedown. The whole ordeal “left me traumatized,” Weisberger told The Guardian. “Powerful women, journalists who I respect to this day, were offended by it. They felt I had not paid my dues, that I was whining and complaining about having to get to work early and get coffees.” On many occasions, Weisberger has confessed that if she had known what she was getting into, she probably wouldn’t have gone through with it.

Weisberger was far from the only former Vogue staffer to write a book partly based on her experience at the magazine. In fact, it’s a tradition that continues today: Just look at Workhorse, Caroline Palmer’s 2025 novel, or Best Dressed, the forthcoming novel by former Vogue editor Filipa Fino. But something about The Devil Wears Prada made it stick; the title alone has become a cultural shorthand for a certain kind of snobbish, cutthroat behavior.

Maybe it was how unafraid Weisberger was to pull punches. (As she noted in her recent Vogue essay, she penned the novel “before I had the distance or the maturity or the sense of self-preservation to round off the edges.”) Maybe it was the timing, how eager readers were to get a peek into Vogue’s inner workings. Maybe it was that, despite all of the criticisms, Weisberger got something right. “She provided a very funny and incisive view into that world—unmasked it,” says Odell. “And it was, in so many ways, so true to Anna.”

Of course, the quality of the film adaptation—directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna—is to thank for much of its staying power. “It's my favorite movie about work and ambition,” says Grynbaum. “I don’t know anyone who doesn’t love it.”

The filmmakers made a few crucial changes to the story, rewriting the third act and making Priestly more well-rounded, which undoubtedly helped. While Weisberger didn’t have a hand in the script, she did enjoy hanging around the set and has nothing but praise for the film. “Someone told me early on that if you just smile and say everything’s amazing and it’s exactly how you envisioned it, they love having writers around,” she told Philadelphia. “So, I did that—and it happened to be true.”

In the years since, the movie has spawned a musical (with songs by Elton John) and now, a sequel. Weisberger has enthusiastically supported both, keeping in touch with the creative teams and visiting the set, though she hasn’t been directly involved with either. “I went to the [Devil Wears Prada 2] set a bunch of times and it felt like stepping back 20 years,” she told the Sunday Times. “Of course, I was the only one who actually aged. Everyone else just looks better, it’s very annoying!”

Lauren Weisberger and her family and the world premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2.TheStewartofNY - Getty Images

Not so identical? How Wintour and Vogue have handled the rollout. In the 20 years since the first movie was released, it seems, Wintour seems to have realized that The Devil Wears Prada movie is an asset to her, a fiction that—despite its warts-and-all approach—has burnished her reputation.

In the early aughts, The Devil Wears Prada team struggled to secure costumes and locations, because designers and vendors were so afraid to make Wintour angry. (For years, she was tight-lipped about the book.) Streep has said that costume designer Patricia Field resorted to buying and returning garments from high-end stores; the actress recalls eating lunch very carefully, so as not to ruin the clothes. The sequel, on the other hand, has been fully embraced by Wintour, who went so far as to appear on the cover of Vogue alongside Streep in support of it. She visited the set, too, though Weisberger was pointedly not there that day. In all these years, the two haven’t spoken.

Nowadays, Weisberger is sanguine about the life The Devil Wears Prada has given her. Largely because of that first, splashy book she’s been able to make a living as a writer. “It just blew up. And then a movie that does hundreds of millions of dollars abroad. I mean, when does that ever happen?” she told Philadelphia in 2010. “When people 10 years later are still asking questions about Anna Wintour, you kinda want to roll your eyes. But it’s the coolest thing ever.”

Yes, when Weisberger’s name does come up these days, it’s almost always in reference to The Devil Wears Prada and her time at Vogue, which she’s now decades removed from. But to be fair, she still feels connected to Andy, too. “I’m often asked whether I still recognize myself in Andy Sachs,” she wrote in her Vogue essay. “The answer is yes, but in the way I recognize myself in an old photograph.”

Until she left Connecticut, she still got her hair cut by the hairdresser Wintour sent her to. And she’s kept a memento or two from her time under her tutelage, including a Prada bag. At the recent The Devil Wears Prada 2 premiere, she let her daughter wear it on the red carpet. “Life is weird and wonderful,” she captioned an Instagram post about the event.

Of course, Wintour was at the event as well — but as director David Frankel told the audience gathered in the theater, they were “probably not sitting together.”

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