In the late 1990s, a bright-eyed Leslie Fremar—fresh off a promotion to Anna Wintour’s first assistant after just six months—found herself in a position to hire a deputy. A few years later, Fremar was reading an advance copy of The Devil Wears Prada…and realized she’d been written into its pages.
“She’s me—I am Emily,” she tells Chloe on this week’s episode of The Run-Through with Vogue. “I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about it.”
Now a stylist for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars—most notably Charlize Theron, a longtime collaborator—Fremar recalls how intimidating her early days at Vogue were. “There were rules passed down to me: I couldn’t eat at my desk. You couldn’t even go to the bathroom, because one of the assistants always had to be there,” she says.
When she stepped into the first assistant role, Fremar loosened things slightly—she even kept a pair of Birkenstocks under her desk. “I think [Anna] knew I would do that,” she says. “I don’t know if I could survive a full day in heels.” She also passed along some pointed advice to her junior assistant: “A million girls would kill for this job,” she recalls saying—a line she still stands by.
When Lauren Weisberger published the novel, Fremar admits she felt betrayed. “We’ve never talked about it—we never spoke again after she left.” Still, she says she doesn’t hold a grudge. Asked what she would say if they spoke today, Fremar is matter-of-fact: “There’s nothing to be said.”
Other parts of her Vogue experience inspire less ambivalence. More than 25 years after her time as an assistant, Fremar received a call from Wintour with an extraordinary opportunity: to style a Vogue cover featuring former Vice President Kamala Harris. “I’ve been doing this for over 20 years and styled many international covers, but never American Vogue,” she says. “It felt like a true full-circle moment—and probably my proudest.”