Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login Plum Sykes would like to set the record straight. “I am not the English girl in The Devil Wears Prada ,” she says via Zoom from her home in Gloucestershire.
“It’s a rumour that’s been around for years and it’s just not true!” The idea that Sykes, a former Vogue writer, was the inspiration for Emily Blunt’s character (also named Emily) is a little grating, she says. “For one thing, I was never Anna Wintour’s assistant ,” says Sykes. “Isn’t it pathetic that I need you to know that?” As satires go, The Devil Wears Prada is pretty much the ne plus ultra , but Sykes knows a thing or two about the genre herself.
Her latest novel, Wives Like Us , skewers the ultra-rich residents of the Cotswolds, a bucolic protected area of England that, incidentally, includes Gloucestershire and its surrounds. Sykes, 54, moved here 15 years ago from London with husband Toby Rowland, a tech entrepreneur and their daughters, Ursula and Tess. In that time, Sykes saw the area become more and more moneyed – and ever more ripe for the sharp end of her pen.
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