I liked the first Devil Wears Prada film, released in 2006. It was an engaging young-woman-comes-of-age-and-into-her-own story, not just in the world of business, but at the heart of the fashion industry, specifically Runway magazine where editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) ruled with an iron fist and put mere mortals like her new assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in their place with a withering stare. Miranda is the titular devil, after all.
Not having seen the original since its release, I was lukewarm about a sequel. I couldn’t imagine any new ground they’d cover, and after reading some early mixed reviews, was still ambivalent. It wasn’t until I pieced together from various sources that this film dealt with some timely and controversial topics that I became intrigued and decided to go see it for myself.
The key cast members reprise their roles. In addition to Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci gives an excellent performance as Nigel, Amanda’s loyal sidekick, and Emily Blount, Andy’s former “frenemy” returns as Emily, now working at Dior. Andy is a dedicated journalist working at a newspaper called The Vanguard, writing alongside her talented colleagues, all of whom are sharing a table at a celebratory luncheon where, just after Andy is announced the winner of an award for her recent series of articles, everyone’s phone at the table lights up as they receive the news they’ve all been fired, turning what should be a happy occasion into a moment of shock and disbelief. Andy takes the opportunity to give an impromptu and impassioned speech about why real journalism still matters, which itself makes the news but in the meantime Andy and her former coworkers are out of a job.
Over at Runway, Miranda is battling a barrage of bad press over a public relations faux pas. Through a series of events that Andy thinks she understands, she’s called back to Runway to do damage control and write articles about pressing issues, dressing them up in enough haute couture for Runway’s key readership. Clever plot twists occur throughout the film and while I’m not always averse to spoilers, I do want to avoid them here. It’s sufficient to say that the main plot centers on whether Runway can survive the brave new world of tech and money, not just the shift to digital content, but the glibness with which certain man-child billionaire titans buy, sell and swap companies, conglomerates and legacy media outlets like baseball cards.
Even if you’re no fan of the fashion industry: its excesses, contradictions and missteps; imagine instead any large-scale enterprise that thrives on human creativity and discernment. When Amanda sees the writing on the wall regarding her eventual fate and that of Runway, she doesn’t grovel for crumbs but remains stoic. Her rock-steady glare in the face of the distracted, multi-tasking exec calling the shots from a table in the office cafeteria with a thrown-together team is the only thing standing between Runway and oblivion until Andy leaps into action. Undeterred by rejection, she pursues the ‘holy grail’ of interviews, tirelessly fighting for real journalism in a new media landscape that treats it as an afterthought at best and at worst, the first thing to be dispensed with.
The future that Andy and company race against throughout the film weaves in and out of today’s actual headlines, warnings and dire prophecies. One tech tycoon hails the promise of a bright digital/ AI future as profoundly desirable for the joys it’ll provide before acknowledging “. . . or it may just smother us to death!” In another scene, giggling billionaire Benji (Justin Theroux) scrolls on his phone mid-conversation with Miranda, detailing what the future could hold for Runway, and that there may come a time when there’ll be no need for writers, photographers, designers, nor models, followed by “. . . and then you’ve got . . .” He trails off with a shrug and barely audible “meh,” still not looking up from his phone. Miranda’s expression says it all: we’re doomed. She’s still stoic, but also horrified.
The obliteration of humanity, about which there’s been much recent talk, is horrifying to us humans. As aforementioned, if you don’t give a fig about fashion, insert something you do care about: books, music, art, theatre, film, nature. And if you think that last item doesn’t belong with the others, a brief digression: The first summer I spent in Palo Alto in the mid-1990’s, I picked up a copy of the Stanford Review (not to be confused with the campus newspaper, the Stanford Daily), a little campus publication featuring articles by its co-founder Peter Thiel and others. I still remember one article concerning the philosophy of certain up-and-coming tech-sters who argued that in the future, there’ll be no need for a world outside the virtual realm. Who wants the messy reality of nature when its digital mirror image exudes such perfection?
Say what you will about fashion mags (I like them myself), in the context of the film, Runway is simply a well-dressed microcosm. Watching Miranda’s reaction to Benji’s mentally disassembling and trashing everything that makes up Runway leads to the much larger question the film raises: is the messy reality of humanity deemed so distasteful and unnecessary by the “powers-that-be” that it’s disposable as well? With all the recent talk of AI destroying everything but itself and the tech bros’ headlong rush to make it all-powerful, this is an existential crisis for the ages. We need more Andys out there rousing the complacent from their slumber.
Too depressing? Fear not, fashionistas! There’s still that trip to Milan and fast-paced montages capturing the rush and excitement of a big-time fashion show set to upbeat music. While Devil Wears Prada 2 has much that’s fun, frothy and popcorn-worthy, the film’s larger issues are embedded in close-ups of the models’ human faces, subtle but revealing exchanges and the tricky relationships navigated by people who may be at odds but nonetheless have vitally important common goals as well.
Even as this film premiered, the ink hadn’t yet dried (whoops, there’s an old-time phrase!) on all the stories about Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez-Bezos sponsoring the “Fashion is Art” themed Met Gala, a move that was derided by many in the media and on social. The ire extended to Vogue magazine, with writers complaining that Vogue’s participation implied tacit approval of Bezos’s business practices, political affiliations, etc. and heaping shame on Vogue for “being okay” with that. Runway is not Vogue, you understand, though the current issue of the latter (real) publication has Anne Wintour, editor-in-chief, on the cover, gazing at Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly. The cover story tells of when Wintour heard there would be a sequel to the original film, she called Streep about it because she knew Streep would tell her the truth about whether it would “be all right.” Streep told her that it would.
I don’t know the whole backstage story of the Met Gala, how Bezos came to sponsor it, nor what Vogue thought about it all, but the story in Devil Wears Prada 2 is about how some people with unserious minds and more money than many nation-states have the ability to flip other peoples’ lives upside-down on a whim, if not delete them entirely. According to the late-great Howard Beale (Peter Finch), washed-up anchorman-turned prophet of the airwaves from the 1976 film Network, in the not-so-distant future, we’ll be “totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods.” Not quite there yet, but as I watch this scene I can imagine the voice of our collective GPS at the end of a journey: “You’ve arrived.”
The grim future Howard Beale describes still seemed somewhat remote as recently as a few years ago, but no longer. That’s why I think this film was made for 2026, twenty years after the original, and as it happens, fifty years after Network. I remember reading a commentary on why they’d never make a movie like Network today, but whether they would or wouldn’t, packaging this particular message into a second Devil Wears Prada is a stroke of genius. In Network, Howard Beale was permanently canceled for delivering a message people didn’t want to hear, but a shiny new Devil Wears Prada movie comes in a Tiffany blue box wrapped in a white satin ribbon. Who doesn’t want to open that? Its already doing better box office than the original here in the States, and even more worldwide.
In the original film, Miranda Priestly held tremendous unilateral power, but these days, as Miranda herself discovers when truth, beauty, and everything else is at stake, we messy human beings need each other now more than ever.
Directed by David Frankel, written by Aline Brosh McKinna. Sequel to the film based on the book by Lauren Weisberger. Also starring Lucy Liu and Kenneth Branagh.