Way of life blogger mentioned to have impressed Devil Wears Prada character makes use of unpaid pupil interns | Life and elegance

She is alleged to have been the inspiration for a personality in The Devil Wears Prada and was a private assistant of Anna Wintour, so Plum Sykes is aware of a factor or two concerning the arduous and infrequently unglamorous lifetime of being a vogue trade intern.

But that recognition doesn’t, it seems, lengthen to paying her personal interns a good wage. Or, certainly, any wage in any respect.

Sykes, an editor at Vogue, has launched her personal Substack, the place she has greater than 20,000 followers – a few of whom pay £65 for her musings. To assist her run her new enterprise, the author, who lives within the Cotswolds, has college students serving to her totally free. She has confronted criticism for not paying them something in any respect for his or her work.

The weblog options private missives in posts equivalent to one which ranks her favorite home visitors based mostly on how a lot they’ve spent on a present when turning up at her residence.

Not solely does Sykes not pay the scholars who help on this enterprise, one has purchased her lavish presents. Sykes just lately boasted that one among them purchased her Hermès gloves, which retail for between £500 and £1,000.

Pandora Sykes (who is not any relation), a former editor at magazines and newspapers, commented below a web-based weblog submit about unpaid interns: “I remember the days of working for expenses only. There is no place – NONE – in 2026 for not paying your contributors, in whatever capacity they contribute”.

Plum is expounded to a baronet and whose household has a sprawling ancestral estate in Yorkshire, admitted she didn’t pay the coed staff for the time being however “hopefully that can change”.

Her great-grandfather was Mark Sykes, who drafted the Sykes-Picot settlement in 1916 that set out an settlement between France and the UK over how they might partition Arab lands within the Middle East. She is married to the tycoon Toby Rowland, the multimillionaire son of the famed businessman Tiny Rowland.

Sykes is alleged to be the inspiration behind Emily Blunt’s fashionable and aloof character within the Devil Wears Prada; the ebook the movie is predicated on was written by one other of Wintour’s different former assistants.

Sykes mentioned her present crop of younger folks do a spread of duties for her, together with a neuroscience pupil who sourced photographers for her in Paris and helped with analytics, and a inventive writing pupil who Sykes wrote “worked tirelessly for a year” on her social media. Another intern, who research at King’s College London, helped her provide you with tales and concepts, and a St Andrews pupil edited her writing and wrote her captions “in a very Plum tone of voice”.

She described one intern as wanting like Cindy Crawford in a “pale pink Sporty and Rich cricket sweater with a tortoiseshell hairband” and one other who had “miles of golden ringlets” and “lovely clothes”.

Employment legislation pointers state that unpaid internships are solely lawful if the work is a mandated requirement for a pupil as a part of their course, whether it is for a charity, or if the work solely consists of shadowing staff and never performing any work-related duties. Sykes says her interns fall into this class.

If an intern is doing productive work relatively than shadowing, they’re legally entitled to the nationwide minimal wage. Previous governments have advised sectors together with vogue and media to cease utilizing unpaid interns and mentioned these doing so might be behaving unlawfully.

Sykes’ employer Condé Nast beforehand needed to pay its former interns $5.8m within the settlement of a class-action lawsuit accusing the journal firm of underpaying its staff. In some circumstances, interns have been making a greenback an hour.

She complained of the shortage of unpaid internships on the media firm in a latest submit, writing: “Officially there are no internships at Condé Nast. Interns are not allowed any more. Something to do with HR or Health and Safety or some such bureaucracy.”

Sophie Sajnani, who runs a college consulting agency and works with younger folks, mentioned: “These laws exist for a reason: so that workers know what they’re worth, can negotiate fairly, and are protected from discrimination. Condé Nast shut down its internship programme when it was forced to confront the cost of unpaid labour. A decade later, that same model is reappearing – not inside institutions, but through individuals with just enough power to replicate it.”

Of the criticism, Sykes mentioned: “These are work experience people doing a couple of hours of supplementary work experience, shadowing me on fashion appointments, for example. This allows them to gain experience, credits for their courses and help them with their future careers.

“There is a big legal difference between work experience and a formal, paid internship, which this is not. This is very casual. They have sometimes done unscheduled occasional tasks for me but there are no set hours, and any tasks they have done are entirely voluntary.”

Carl Cullinane, the director of analysis and coverage on the Sutton Trust, mentioned: “Internships are an increasingly critical route into the best jobs, and it’s shocking that in this day and age, many employers still pay interns below the minimum wage, or worse, nothing at all.”

Paul Nowak, the TUC’s basic secretary, added: “Unpaid internships, trials and shadowing are far too common. And it’s young people from working-class backgrounds who tend to lose out.

“If young people remain pressured to work for free, legislative change will be needed to make it crystal clear that unpaid work is illegal.”

Sykes added: “When I put up my ad, I received multiple applications from people who had already left college. This is a reflection of how difficult the media job market is right now.

“They were often already working part-time jobs, and yet still wanted unpaid work experience. Although I knew this was likely their only route to breaking into the media, I had to tell them that I was only considering people who were still students – who could ‘earn’ credits for their degree in return for the work experience I could give them.

“I turned away an awful lot of people. I advised them that if they had left college, I could not get in the way of them getting paid work, and that needed to be their main focus.”