.jpg?w=810&resize=810&ssl=1 "20 years after The Devil Wears Prada, a look at the New York that it depicted")
That KT Tunstall anthem kicks in, the screen splits, and suddenly you see it: women across Manhattan getting dressed for work – saturated lipstick, high heels, roaring zippers – while Anne Hathaway pulls on a lumpy sweater in an apartment that could only cost around £1,100 a month if three people were splitting it. You know the rest. Meryl Streep in white hair and sunglasses. Stanley Tucci breaking bad news with singularly gentle aplomb. Emily Blunt being one stomach flu from her goal weight. “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.” The movie grossed £241 million and did something no fashion brand has managed since: it made an entire industry legible to people who’d never picked up a masthead in their lives. The cerulean monologue became shorthand for any moment a boss made you feel catastrophically stupid about something you hadn’t realised you were supposed to know. But rewatching it now, with a sequel arriving 1 May, what lingers alongside the dialogue is the city it was pinned to. Every scene lands on a specific block, a specific lobby, a specific restaurant in New York. Those locations tell a second story: what New York looked like when magazines and their editors ran the culture, and what happened once that stopped being the case. And while a lot of that New York no longer exists, some of it does – let’s take a look.
A million girls would kill to commute to this office
The lobby of 1221 Avenue of the Americas still has that corporate hush engineered by marble and money. The film crew called it Elias-Clark, the fictional publishing empire where Miranda terrorised assistants and designers with equal conviction. The building was never actually Condé Nast – too obvious – but the production needed something that looked like power from the sidewalk, and this 51-story McGraw-Hill tower delivered. Today, its tenants include Deloitte and NBCUniversal; a $50 million plaza renovation is connecting it to the Rockefeller Centre concourse below. But of course, Elias-Clark was always Condé Nast. Lauren Weisberger published the novel in 2003 serving as Anna Wintour’s personal assistant at Vogue for a year, and the roman à clef fooled no one – least of all anyone who’d ever ridden the elevator at 4 Times Square and emerged spiritually altered. Runway was Vogue. Miranda Priestly was Wintour with plausible deniability and better lighting.
The real Condé Nast building – the one Weisberger wrote about, the one Miranda Priestly’s office mirrored – sat 10 blocks south of the film’s Elias-Clark, at 4 Times Square. Condé moved to 1 World Trade Centre in November 2014; Nasdaq relocated its global headquarters to the old address in 2018, and TikTok now runs its East Coast operation from the upper floors. But in the aughts, 4 Times Square was the parish. On the fourth floor, Frank Gehry had designed a $12 million cafeteria that editors either called the Commissary or, less charitably, the Aquarium for its panoptic qualities. David Graver, now the editor-in-chief of Surface, remembers the room as one of two gravitational forces in his early career at Condé. “I found it terrifying,” he says. David Jefferys, who logged three decades at the company before moving on, had an entirely different read: “Wonky, hard-to-navigate.” You’d sit down, realise Wintour was 10 feet away, and composure was no longer optional. The cafeteria sat empty for years after Condé’s departure before Durst poured $35 million into converting it to WellPlated, a tenant-only food hall run by Michelin-starred chef Claus Meyer. The titanium curtains survived behind fresh plaster. The orange leather didn’t.
Several editors recalled sharing car rides or elevator banks with magazine titans like Wintour or André Leon Talley and described their unquestionable command of physical space. The film nailed that. What it inflated was the wardrobe budget. Andy’s post-makeover montage struts her past the old Hermès boutique at 690 Madison Ave – Emily gets hit by a car on the same block. The maison has since migrated one block north to a four-story limestone flagship at 706 Madison, designed by RDAI inside a landmarked 1921 Bank of New York building, complete with a Champagne bar, rooftop garden, and a 49-foot Portuguese limestone spiral staircase. The wardrobe cost costume designer Patricia Field roughly one million dollars to assemble. As for what the movie got hilariously wrong? Matthew Marden, fashion editor at Details from 2004 to 2015 and now the owner of Dugazon, a shop in Sharon, Connecticut, doesn’t hesitate. “Hands down, their ginormous fashion closet. It’s high camp. Those illuminated columns and hanging pleated pendants? Mommie Dearest territory.” Erin Florio, Condé Nast Traveler‘s current global features director and one of the longest-serving names on the masthead, puts the ordinary editor’s actual budget concisely. She wasn’t yet at Traveller during the era the film depicts – she was at Travel + Leisure, which had an office near the Hippodrome Theatre – going to “a Belgian bar or anywhere we could afford.”
