I googled The Devil Wears Prada because we saw it yesterday, and came up with this reviewlet by (powerful woman in public life with her own public relations issues) Barbara Amiel, who is apparently a friend of subject à clef Anna Wintour.

Meryl Streep's character? My dear. Brilliant performance, of course, but nothing at all like Anna Wintour - the wrongest possible clothes and and my dear, the most deeply wrong shoes, and utterly without that indefinable something else

I encountered [Wintour] once under the canopy of a Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. She looked a knockout, wearing a fantastic Yves Saint Laurent snakeskin trench coat. 'You must have it,' she said. 'Go and get it. There's a size 36 left.' I wanted to ask what it cost but hadn't the guts. That afternoon, I forked out some $12,000 at the Madison Avenue store and took it home for an hour, only to return it the same day. When she asked me later, I mumbled something about having exhausted my budget for the season. 'But it's only $3,000,' she said.

Meryl Streep's Miranda would have to pay retail.

And there you have it. Meryl Streep's Miranda is so much less fabulous than Anna Wintour that she doesn't take nine thousand dollar gifts from businesses she covers in her magazine.

You can dress them up, of course, but one can always tell the little people.

Bartender, saucers of milk for my friends.

Probably the most fabulous thing about this story is, of course, is that Ms. Amiel is being just the tiniest bit disingenuous about her own wardrobe spending

Just as Conrad's troubles began to mount, Barbara wrote an article in FQ magazine, in which she described how her personal priorities had escalated into never-never land, ignoring her husband's troubles. "For some people," she wrote, emphatically including herself, "jewellery is a defining attribute, rather like your intelligence or the number of residences you have." She boasted about owning "a fantastic natural-pearl and diamond brooch," which languished in her safety deposit box because it was simply too big to wear. The contents of her London closets became common gossip, including more than a dozen Hermès Birkin bags and 30 to 40 jewel-handled Renaud Pellegrino handbags. But it was her collection of Manolo Blahnik shoes that attracted the most attention. These are not boots made for walkin'. Their Spanish designer, who calls himself "a sculptor and engineer," carves each last by hand out of beechwood, "giving special thought to toe cleavage." They start at about $600 a pair, and Barbara had well over 100 in her London house alone, some with kitten heels. ("Buckingham Palace floors don't like stilettos," she explained to the uninitiated among us.) The arrangement they had was that Barbara paid for her off-the-rack purchases while the hubby sprung for her couture.

According to Richard Breeden's special investigative report, Barbara was paid US$1,141,558 between 1999 and 2003, for which there was "no meaningful work in return." That included her retainer for editorial advice to the Chicago Sun-Times where, employees claimed, she had not set foot for more than four years. On top of that, she received more than US$1 million through a company named Black-Amiel Management. Black has launched a libel suit as a result of the Breeden report, and Amiel has denied the allegations.

Meanwhile, on April 12, 2004, Amiel cashed in options to buy Hollinger stock for nearly US$3.1 million, some US$2.25 million below market value. That meant she was profiting from her husband's downfall, since that's what was driving the stock price higher.

...the orgy of her spending habits had attracted the attention of minority shareholders' groups. Their accountants costed out her closet and calculated that the wife of the chairman of a company that had shrunk to three major dailies from 500 papers and was losing serious money could not possibly afford her self-advertised lifestyle. It was her boasts about her wardrobe, which some SEC investigators assigned to the case had learned to recite by heart, that provided the catalyst for the allegations that followed. Not since the Edwardian Age had anyone so blatantly dropped their inhibitions about showing off their material possessions. It was almost as if they believed the "lower orders" would enjoy the spectacle, instead of being disgusted, while London society shuddered in embarrassment.

The rest, of course, is history, as is Mr. Black's empire, his career as a second-string Rupert Murdoch, anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholders' money (or at least so it is alleged by a multiple shareholders' suits, charges laid by the US Attorney, and announced proceedings against him by Ontario stock market regulators).

The Black/Amiel team has since been forced to sell off many of its holdings (which at one time included the services and the (as it turned out, fungible) loyalty of Hollinger board member and Iraq war architect Richard Perle and the rather expensive support of George Will).

To top it off, for reasons having to do with charges against him in the US, Black has been trying to get back the canadian citizenship he renounced so that the british government could honor him by inducting him into the House of Lords as the Baron of a railway station (Ms. Amiel is Lady (Baroness) Black of [Railway Station], but of course she writes as a commoner). Canada is not showing great interest.

Excepting the remarkably punctilious Ms. Wintour, reportedly, no-one is.

Ladies and gentlemen, your corporate media and the sea it swims in.