Lifestyle blogger said to have inspired Devil Wears Prada character uses unpaid student interns

Use of interns by Plum Sykes, an ex-assistant of Anna Wintour whose family owns a Yorkshire estate, reignites debate about creative industries

She is said to have been the inspiration for a character in The Devil Wears Prada and was a personal assistant of Anna Wintour, so Plum Sykes knows a thing or two about the arduous and often unglamorous life of being a fashion industry intern.

But that recognition does not, it appears, extend to paying her own interns a fair wage. Or, indeed, any wage at all.

Sykes, an editor at Vogue, has launched her own Substack, where she has more than 20,000 followers – some of whom pay £65 for her musings. To help her run her new business, the writer, who lives in the Cotswolds, has students helping her for free. She has faced criticism for not paying them anything at all for their work.

The blog features personal missives in posts such as one that ranks her favourite house guests based on how much they have spent on a gift when turning up at her home.

Not only does Sykes not pay the students who assist in this enterprise, one has bought her lavish gifts. Sykes recently boasted that one of them bought her Hermès gloves, which retail for between £500 and £1,000.

Pandora Sykes (who is no relation), a former editor at magazines and newspapers, commented under an online blog post 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 related to a baronet and whose family has a sprawling ancestral estate in Yorkshire, admitted she did not pay the student workers at the moment but “hopefully that can change”.

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

Sykes is said to be the inspiration behind Emily Blunt’s stylish and aloof character in the Devil Wears Prada; the book the film is based on was written by another of Wintour’s other former assistants.

Sykes said her current crop of young people do a range of tasks for her, including a neuroscience student who sourced photographers for her in Paris and helped with analytics, and a creative writing student who Sykes wrote “worked tirelessly for a year” on her social media. Another intern, who studies at King’s College London, helped her come up with stories and ideas, and a St Andrews student edited her writing and wrote her captions “in a very Plum tone of voice”.

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

Employment law guidelines state that unpaid internships are only lawful if the work is a mandated requirement for a student as part of their course, if it is for a charity, or if the work only includes shadowing workers and not performing any work-related tasks. Sykes says her interns fall into this category.

If an intern is doing productive work rather than shadowing, they are legally entitled to the national minimum wage. Previous governments have told sectors including fashion and media to stop using unpaid interns and said those doing so could be behaving unlawfully.

Sykes’ employer Condé Nast previously had to pay its former interns $5.8m in the settlement of a class-action lawsuit accusing the magazine company of underpaying its workers. In some cases, interns were making a dollar an hour.

She complained of the lack of unpaid internships at the media company in a recent post, 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 university consulting firm and works with young people, said: “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 said: “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 research and policy at the Sutton Trust, said: “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 general 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.”