Picture, if you will, a gathering at Milan Fashion Week, hosted by one of the world’s glossiest magazines and attended by planetary VIPs. The event: a post-show dinner. The mood: celebratory. The setting: a rectory in a state of photo-friendly disrepair. Candles cast flickering light on the age-worn walls. Champagne flows. Every detail has been considered. Every invite has been curated. Every element of the evening, from the decor to the passed hors d’oeuvres, hews to the mandates of quiet luxury—save for the guests themselves, many of them clad in sequins and satin, all of them serving as reminders that luxury, even the quiet kind, has a way of making itself loud.
The event might have been hosted by Vogue; this version was put on by Runway, the fictional publication in The Devil Wears Prada 2. In the film, it is a climactic scene: What goes down will decide the fate of the magazine and the people who produce it, including Miranda Priestly, the imperious and embattled editor in chief, and Andy Sachs, the newly installed features editor. The evening’s import is conveyed by the fact that the dinner is set not in a standard-issue rectory but in the one that belongs to Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie—the same room where, in the final years of the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci transformed a wall into the mural that would come to be known as The Last Supper.
The backdrop is proof that history, whether tragic or comic or something in between, can also be an aesthetic—and read as a metaphor. Viewers might sense a grand statement being made by the invocation of this famous painting. Here, gathered in the rectory, are humanity’s self-styled elites: the rich, the beautiful, the powerful. And there, above them, is Leonardo’s image of Jesus—arms outstretched, eyes cast down—presiding over the scene.
The Last Supper depicted Jesus breaking bread with his followers, one of which would soon betray him. Devil 2 can be interpreted as a rendition of that narrative, in which Miranda (played by Meryl Streep) is awaiting her own potential betrayal—perhaps by Emily (Emily Blunt), the assistant she long ago tossed aside, or by Andy (Anne Hathaway), her old mentee.
This is all, of course, a provocation, a way of merging the sacred and profane, and asking which is which. Andy Warhol silk-screened a reproduction of The Last Supper, turning it into a piece of kaleidoscopic pop art. The organizers of the 2024 Paris Olympics staged a version featuring drag queens. Devil 2 treats the work more earnestly. As my colleague David Sims recently wrote, Runway, in this sequel, “is becoming a relic.” Miranda, herself risking relic-hood, is no longer the terrifying presence she once was. On the contrary, the film’s use of the painting suggests that the character, at risk of being betrayed, is now a figure worthy of redemption.
The qualities that made the first Devil so effective were the clarity of its terms and its own ambivalence toward the industry it skewered. Through Andy—a former editor in chief of The Daily Northwestern who considers herself a serious reporter, and who takes the job “a million girls would kill for” while turning up her nose at it—the film pitted “real” journalism against fashion journalism, questioning which subjects were meaningful and which were superficial. But both Andy and the film were conflicted. They loved fashion and resented it. They appreciated the artistry of couture but were keenly aware of its outlandish expense, and of how fashion appealed to, and sometimes provided cover for, a class system that was not always visible.
Devil 2 has abandoned the old ambivalence about fashion’s role in the world. Proving that vertical integration can rise to the heights of a Louboutin heel, the movie leans hard into the idea that fashion is art—adopting, as it happens, the same theme as last week’s Met Gala, overseen by Vogue and its global editorial director, Anna Wintour. The film is not a continuation of the first; it’s an all-out inversion of it.
Fashion, in the original, was more than pretty clothes and “wearable art”; it was an industry, which, in Miranda’s formulation, lent it gravitas. Fashion was also complicated—art and commerce, soulful and pragmatic, aspirational and banal—and its ambiguity made it interesting.
In the sequel, this nuance is lost. The unsubtle decision to invoke The Last Supper may be baffling; it is consonant, though, with the breadth of the movie’s message. Miranda, in her assumption that she is to be betrayed, may be making a metaphorical claim to earthly divinity—but so is the field she represents. Here, fashion itself is the victim. It wears the indivisible halo. It is deified.
And the enemy? It is no longer old-school consumerism. It is big data and big finance, and their small sense of human possibility. McKinsey is a villain. So are tight-fisted, technocratic executives. The devil is no longer a lightly fictionalized version of Wintour. It is Benji Barnes, a tech mogul evocative of Jeff Bezos (played, as a flesh-and-blood deepfake, by Justin Theroux).
The recipient of a recent glow-up, Barnes is unimaginably wealthy and therefore unaccountably powerful. He is also foppish and foolish—the kind of entrepreneur who sets his sights, unironically, on landing on the sun. This new antagonist is a caricature of what can happen when egos, like extreme wealth, go unregulated. But villains are load-bearing characters, and this villain is so cartoonish that he ultimately holds little weight.
The original Devil was successful because it allowed Streep to be treated as its star despite her playing, effectively, a supporting role—and because Streep embodied Miranda so deliciously. Her monstrosity somehow had layers: She was a boss who seemed to flit effortlessly across all nine of Dante’s hellish circles. The ballast she provided made the film’s appointed heroine, Andy—who treated pluck as a personality type and believed that she was somehow above, or exempt from, the industry in which she toiled—more sympathetic than she otherwise might have been.
In Devil 2, we get Andy 2.0, grown-up but relatively unchanged. Instead, Miranda is the one transformed. She is still selfish and capable of casual, at times strategic, cruelty. But she has shed much of her old acridity, having ceded her villain status to Barnes. Devil 2, in that way, might be viewed as an allegory. Miranda and Andy, together, represent the sacred: artistry, vision, humanism. Emily and Barnes represent the profane: AI, algorithms, culture-via–data set. Throughout the movie, the artists are betrayed by the machines that were supposed to serve them. Runway, that bible of fashion and art, is under threat—from Barnes, from his grim brand of techno-Darwinism, from the large language model made flesh.
The conflict is a timely one for the film to engage with. As a narrative proposition, though, it is remarkably inert. The new Devil is an accomplished sequel in that it serves fans and challenges them. It offers a detailed, considered look at the existential crises facing Runway and its peers—and an impassioned argument for the value of journalism as an industry. But satire, as a rule, falls flat when the satirist has so little to say. It falls flatter still when the satirist says so little, so loudly. The sharp terms of the original film have broadened so epically as to be nearly meaningless: human versus technology, art versus data, the visionary versus the vendor. These binaries fail as stakes because they are false as distinctions.
The first movie, like the novel it was based on, was a winking act of pseudofiction, powerful in part because audiences knew that, despite the legal disclaimers (any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental), they were watching fake versions of real people. To some extent, The Devil Wears Prada was fan fiction, told from the perspective of someone (Andy, a.k.a. Lauren Weisberger, the novel’s author) whose love of the fashion industry had been betrayed. The film took the age-old advice don’t meet your heroes and explored it at feature length. Its sequel had the potential to do something similar, with even more wincing acuity. Instead, it pulls its punches. It assumes that technology and humanity are oppositional forces, when the more interesting point—and the truer one—is that the two are, in the end, one and the same.
The movie’s marketing machine worked exactly as it was supposed to: The film’s opening weekend led up to the Met Gala, organized—as always—by Vogue, and co-chaired by … Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The couple paid millions for the honor; the event itself paid a different price. Several of its regular attendees were conspicuously absent, which some people speculated was a form of protest against Bezos and his influence. But many celebrities, including cast members of Devil 2, walked the carpet, displaying their takes on the “Fashion Is Art” theme. Some of the outfits were museum-worthy works. A smattering seemed to double as protest art. (Sarah Paulson’s ensemble, which came complete with a dollar bill hovering, like Magritte’s apple, over her eyes, might—or might not—have been its own kind of sequel: to the Tax the Rich dress that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so famously wore to the same event five years ago.)
Mostly, though, concession was the evening’s theme. In real life, Bezos was the lead funder of the ball, skirting the red carpet and holding court at the party in comfort and style. As Earth’s elite gathered, supping and posing and taking bathroom selfies, he was the one at the center, surrounded by disciples. What is sacred? What is profane? The movie said one thing; the gala said another. In the end, though, the wealth stole the show.