Then came the evening’s central tease: an advance screening of The Devil Wears Prada 2—strictly no spoilers, gird your loins for its opening next week. And when the credits rolled, guests stayed planted in their seats for a post-screening conversation, recorded live for Vogue’s The Run-Through podcast, with two particularly beloved Vogue alumni: William a.k.a Billy Norwich, the longtime writer and editor now overseeing fashion and interior design at Phaidon Press, and celebrity stylist Kate Young—once Anna Wintour’s assistant, now the force behind the red-carpet wardrobes of Dakota Johnson, Scarlett Johansson, and Rose Byrne. The conversation proved nearly as entertaining as the film itself.
Asked what she made of the film’s characterization of her former life, Young, reassessing Andy Sachs with prosecutorial rigor, announced: “She’s a terrible assistant. She should have got fired,” before adding, to cheers, that Andy’s boyfriend was “the worst.” She admitted she had loved even the tasks the book cast as drudgery. “I liked that she put her dry cleaning and coat on my desk,” she said. “I opened the closet and unzipped it and thought—wow, cool. I had never seen couture before.” Seeing the film in 2006 unsettled her so much she “called my therapist,” wondering, “Am I a masochist?! I loved this job.”
Her recollection of the book’s first arrival in the office was even better: Lisa Love passing around galleys through interoffice mail, assistants sneaking them down to the Four Times Square (then Vogue HQ) loading dock to read aloud between cigarettes. “It was horrible,” Young laughed of recognizing the satire. “She was making fun of us.” But what, she seemed to suggest, was worth making fun of was also what made the place thrilling. “Everyone worked so hard. Everyone was so smart…they could talk about shoes for a day.” It was, she said, the first time she thought, “I’m not a freak. I love these people.”
Norwich, meanwhile, revived one of Vogue lore’s great artifacts: the legendary hundred-question culture test he once devised to weed out aspiring assistants who, as he put it, “never read Vogue.” As he explained, he and Charles Gandee built the exam from a hundred figures who formed Vogue’s “constant cast of characters”—“if they wrote a book, if they coughed, if they made a frock, they got covered in Vogue.” Recently resurrected by The New York Times and gone viral anew, the quiz seemed almost a secret handshake for many in the audience.
Then Malle unearthed an old piece of career advice from Kate, who once said aspiring stylists should “max out your credit card and start smoking.” Asked whether it still held up, Young laughed that perhaps not.
Perhaps not. But it was a fitting final note for an evening spent revisiting the legends people tell about work, style, and ambition.
