As I sat in an AMC theater on 34th Street to watch Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci reunite onscreen for The Devil Wears Prada 2, all I could do was quote Euphoria’s Maddy Perez when, in season two, she watches her friend Lexi put on a play about their friend group. “Is this fucking play about us?” she asks rhetorically, puzzled by the performance. Yes, this play is about us. And it got a lot of it right.
The premise of the much-discussed sequel, which hits theaters this Friday, is that Andy Sachs (Hathaway) returns to Runway, the fictional magazine under the editorship of Miranda Priestly (Streep), to help her formidable boss navigate a new media landscape that has seen the power shift from publications to brands and advertisers. You see Emily Charlton (Blunt), now an executive at Dior, practically scold Miranda after a misstep and—gasp—give her marching orders. You see Nigel Kipling (Tucci) lament how the magazine is no longer a magazine, but a website and an app, and how they now shoot “content,” and you also see him remind Andy that the clothes he gives her from the Runway fashion closet have to be returned. You see a group of journalists get laid off via text. It’s all a little harsh on the media industry, and yet not entirely inaccurate.
This jarringness is to the film’s credit. Hollywood has historically had a hard time depicting the fashion industry, and that’s because it strives to show fashion as the version of the industry that lives in the collective imagination: melodramatic, vapid, and overly flamboyant. A self-serious punch line. (Emily in Paris is a clear example of how these dramatizations of the goings-on in fashion can veer toward corny.) But what The Devil Wears Prada got right the first time, allowing it to cut through the noise 20 years ago, is that it gave fashion people gravitas and self-awareness.
Yes, it is an industry built on appearances—we know that—but it’s also a trillion-dollar business that exists at the intersection of most, if not all, pockets of society. The original movie is, to this day, the most accurate depiction of the inner workings and inner monologues of fashion. Miranda’s famed cerulean polemic has become the standard-bearer of this, but there is a moment in which Nigel explains to Andy why Runway matters as a vessel for culture that I think gets at the motivation of these figures best.
The sequel has done well to retain this spirit—a balance between earnest, pithy, and humorous—while acknowledging that audiences now simply know more about how all of this works. They know that magazines have advertisers, they know that actors have hefty brand deals, and they know that a magazine staffer cannot afford luxury clothing with a media salary. The very direct references to the intricacies of this world may go over the heads of most viewers, but will entertain those who know—and keep them interested. It worked on me.
By saying a lot of the quiet parts out loud, the sequel actually transcends the trap of cringe fashion depictions to become, simply, an entertaining sequel. It’s fun, if often a little silly and self-referential—why would its faux Met Gala carpet be cerulean blue, and why would the theme of the exhibition be “Spring Florals” when that’s something Miranda has reproached for unoriginality in the past? I’ll also say that it leans a bit too much into niche gossip about the media industry—I don’t know that I needed the unfounded rumor of Jeff Bezos wanting to buy Vogue for Lauren Sánchez Bezos to materialize as a plot point that paints Emily as a would-be Sánchez Bezos. Still, I appreciate that the film attempts to reflect the real world. Its predecessor’s success has always been about just that—it tells a real story.