Three former assistants to Anna Wintour have lifted the lid on what life in Vogue the editor’s office was really like, and some of it is straight out of the movie, while other details are somewhat more boring.
Sache Taylor, Sammi Tapper and Marley Marius, who each worked in Wintour’s office for between one and four years from 2017 to October 2025, sat down with Vogue‘s new head of editorial content Chloe Malle for the brand’s The run-through with Vogue podcast.
The timing is not accidental, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is coming, and Wintour has already posed on the cover of her own magazine alongside Meryl Streep.
The interview process alone sets the tone.
Candidates are advised not to wear black, Wintour loves color and has said it’s the one thing she would never wear head-to-toe.
And don’t expect to be asked about your strengths and weaknesses. “She doesn’t want a robot,” Marius said, remembering the advice she was given beforehand. “She wants one with a personality.”
Once hired, the learning curve is steep.
Marius described inheriting a 21-page handbook that was passed down from assistant to assistant, a sacred text that covers everything about how the office runs.
The day starts early. Wintour herself wakes up between 4 and 5:30 on weekdays, plays tennis, reads the news and arrives at the office around 8, where an assistant has already set up his coffee, breakfast and schedule.
All her emails and documents, including every reply, are printed out for her to see. Her daily to-do list sits on an iPad.
Regarding footwear, which is very much a theme in the film, the reality is more practical than glamorous.
Marius only lasted two weeks in the heels before he changed apartments.
“Things happen at a certain pace and sometimes that involves a bit of running,” she explained. “When she asks for someone, she wants that person very quickly.”
Tapper spent weeks in pumps that gave her blisters before she quietly retired them, though she still wore heels most days. The unspoken rule, she said, was simple: no jeans, no sneakers.
Taylor, who spent four years as an assistant and now plans the Met Gala as Vogue‘s special events director, recalled having to coax slow-moving editors into meetings with Wintour by using a two-assistant system, one on a landline, one physically hovering at the editor’s desk.
“I would just hover until they were ready, if I hovered they were usually faster,” she said.
She also found an unexpected fitness benefit. “I loved running around because I was so busy I could never exercise. So I would just run in the office.”
Then there’s the take-home bag, an extra-large LLBean Boat and Tote filled every night with articles awaiting Wintour’s edits, notes and feedback.
“She never wants someone waiting on her for feedback,” Tapper explained. The infamous “book,” the magazine’s printed dummy featured heavily in the film, goes into that bag every night, and is returned the next morning covered in Post-It notes written in what Taylor described as “doctors’ handwriting” that “takes a village” to decipher.
“I would allow myself to ask her once a week [what one of her notes said]”, she recalled.
