‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Might As Well Be A Horror Movie [REVIEW]

The first Devil Wears Prada film came out in 2006. This was a time in our collective history when Whitney from The Hills moved to The City to work for Miss “if you have to cry, go outside” herself, Kelly Cutrone. And shows like Project Runway were consistently getting between 2 and 3 million viewers per episode, 10 times what they get today. Elite New York fashion schools like Parsons and The Fashion Institute of Technology (my alma mater) saw a golden age of excitement and cultural cachet. And no matter where you were in the world, you either saw The Devil Wears Prada, or you at least heard one of its infinitely quotable lines (even if you think you haven’t).

Thousands of us watched Andy Sachs get her behind whipped into submission at a fashion magazine job that bordered on serfdom, and then decided it would be a dream to experience the same kind of abuse. Move to New York and be exploited in service of fashion? Sign me up, baby! Have you seen that closet?

Those were the good old days.

I remember obsessively googling the Vogue internship program, which was discontinued after a girl complained about the treatment she received. And I remember thinking how she had ruined it for the rest of us. But nothing could get in my way, so I made my plans, packed my bags, and was off to New York the second my name was uttered at my high school graduation.

I went to (arguably) the best fashion school in the world. I interned at world-renowned fashion houses until I decided I’d rather poke my eyes out than spend another 12-hour day dressing models in a room the size of a shoebox for market week, and then not get paid. The lucky ones were the ones running up 5th Avenue with bags of Hermès scarves and Starbucks coffees. All the rest of us were packing garments in a warehouse and profusely apologizing for walking in on Victoria Beckham changing clothes (a story for another time).

Still, a couple of times a year, it was glamorous and fun, and the fashion week parties, the connections, and the New York of it all were why you got into the business, if you were in your teens and twenties. I look fondly on those memories but don’t particularly regret leaving them behind.

Then today, I saw the new Devil Wears Prada 2. Don’t get me wrong, as a movie, it is fantastic. It’s got everything we miss about the blockbuster films of the early 2000s. Mainly, that women who don’t pretend to love superheroes can partake.

The film follows almost the exact same story beats as the first movie. It is, at times, heartwarming, and at least a dozen times, the packed auditorium was roaring with laughter. The audience even hooted as Emily, clad in head-to-toe Dior, was revealed. We got a great 6-degrees-of-separation montage à la Harry Potter manuscript moment from the first film, as well as the iconic shots of New York City, and of course, fashion moments galore.

However, this time around, Andy is an accomplished journalist who is hired to save Runway from a PR crisis involving a fast-fashion brand that uses sweatshops. The magazine has changed and become more of a vehicle for advertising than a fashion book, and Miranda now feels almost deferential to partners and advertisers like Emily, who’s now heading marketing at Dior.

Miranda is now more accessible than ever. She’s so accessible, in fact, that her publisher’s son greets her with a shoulder punch. TWICE! Andy feels comfortable stopping by her house unannounced. She hangs up her own coat because there have been complaints to HR, and when her budget’s cut, she hilariously, if implausibly, flies coach (she’d pay the upgrade fee out-of-pocket). She’s vulnerable, and she shares her excitement and her fears. She, like everything and everyone else in the movie, as in real life, has been democratized.

In this movie, the characters are almost directly lifted from real-life culture-shapers. There’s Benji, a Jeff Bezos type who is dating Emily. Sasha, his ex-wife, who is a well-intentioned Mackenzie Scott type. Irv and his son Jay, who own Elias Clarke, are Murdoch types, and all of it is pointing in one direction: AI will take over everything eventually, “like the lava took over Pompeii,” as Benji reminds Miranda.

The film does not mean to catastrophize. Au contraire, it attempts to tell the opposite story of fighting the system, clawing their way up against those who mean to take print journalism down, but the result is disappointing. They save the day, but there might as well be a chyron spelling out the words: not for long. The film ends with a cloud hanging over the magazine.

Always being in fight mode might have looked appealing 20 years ago when you weren’t staring the end of civilization in the face. Now fighting will buy you, at most, two years of exhausting creative work so you can watch it all fall apart when AI inevitably replaces your entire industry with recycled slop.

It speaks to a larger trend in real life: young people do not want to spend every moment of their lives working to build something only to watch it collapse under the weight of a billionaire adding another zero to their net worth. Watching The Devil Wears Prada 2, with all its glamour, beautiful Italian vistas, and spectacular costumes worn by near-perfect humans, leaves you with the opposite feeling you got watching its predecessor: the end is nigh, and there’s little to look forward to. Don’t come looking for a career here; you won’t find it.

I grieve for the generations who live with the anxiety of the looming end, and I cherish my memories of that industry a little more now.