Get to know ... Miranda Priestly, Editor-in-Chief for Runway

She is cold as ice, the ice queen of the New York and global fashion scene. She plays with her authority and notoriety, deciding what will be in and what will look drag on the storefront all over the world. Her tongue is as sharp as the tip of her Montblanc pen, and scares the critics, stylists and designers away. Not only that, her workplace tyranny is legendary and 'many girls would kill for the job' is her favorite quote. With her Cruella-inspired white hair, she is the unmistakably Cruella de Vil of the fashion world. Who is she? Meet Miranda Priestly, the Editor-in-Chief for fictional New York based fashion magazine, Runway.

Known as the fiction version of Anna Wintour, Miranda Priestly is the antagonist of bestselling chic lit novel, The Devil Wears Prada. Authored by Lauren Weisberger, the former personal assistant US Vogue's Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, the qualities that Miranda has is slightly the same as to Anna. Though less is known about her, according to an entry in Wikipedia, Miranda was born as Miriam Princhek to a poor, devout Orthodox Jewish family in the East of London. Her mother died in childbirth and she and her siblings were raised by her father and grandmother.

Most of the time, the family sought community help because her father ocassionally works odd jobs and have no fixed income. Miranda never attended college and worked as an assistant to a British designer. At night she took French classes and soon was made the junior editor of French magazine Chic. Later, she worked with the French edition of Runway in Paris for 10 years and got transferred to New York under the decision made by Elias-Clarke, a renowned publication company. In New York, she took the post as Editor-in-Chief for the American edition and moved her family into a penthouse on the famous Fifth Avenue.

Her style trademark is a white Hermes scarf on her neck and wears fur coats and multitude of designer bags, mostly from Prada. Earlier, we have mentioned her infamous workplace tyranny isn't it? Well, she is an office tyrant indeed. She tends to treat her subordinates by drawing emotional borders and abuses them psychologically. In one scene of the movie, she displayed her notoriety by rejecting an entire collection from a young New York designer. Earlier, she criticizes the way her new assistant Andrea dressed.

But true as it seems, many girls are vying for the job as the personal assistant to fashion magazine editors like Miranda. In the novel, which was later given a silver screen treatment, one girl, Andrea Sachs, made it out of hundreds of other girls who applied for the same position. Though both Anna and Lauren denies similarities between the Vogue editor and Miranda, there are several things that both Anna and Miranda have in common - size-zero thin, fashion quirky,native Londoners who never attended college, and have troubles in remembering names of people who works with them.

For the movie version, Meryl Streep was chosen to breathe life into Miranda's character. Indeed, her portrayal of the icy yet demanding queen bee of fashion won her the Best Actress in Musical and Comedy Award at the recent Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles, California.

So, if you missed watching Miranda's tyranny at cinemas, fret not because 20th Century Fox recently released the DVD edition of the movie and available in all video stores near you.

*Miranda's Bio taken from Wikipedia. Photos courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

The Devil Wears Prada Movie tie-in Novel and DVD are available at all bookstores and video shops near you.