Weisberger's coming-of-age story bu

Weisberger's coming-of-age story builds to a crisis that ultimately is resolved when Andrea curses Miranda out at a fashion show, loses her job and regains her self-esteem with a 2,000-word freelance assignment for Seventeen magazine, thus inching her that much closer to her summit with David Remnick. But if Andrea doesn't ever realize why she should care about Miranda Priestly, why should we care about Andrea, or prize the text for anything more than the cheap frisson of the context? Having worked at Vogue myself for eight years and having been mentored by Anna Wintour, I have to say Weisberger could have learned a few things in the year she sold her soul to the devil of fashion for $32,500. She had a ringside seat at one of the great editorial franchises in a business that exerts an enormous influence over women, but she seems to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure of the job her boss was doing, or what it might cost a person like Miranda Priestly to become a character like Miranda Priestly. Surely there are much larger social forces at work in fashion, as in all subcultures, and the Mirandas of the world, as much as they seem like casualties of their own psychology, are also reflections of us -- our ideas of style, our hunger for glamour, our age-old need for a consummate antagonist in a chic red suit.