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.