Imagine walking down a busy street of a metropolitan city, the blisters on your feet rubbing against the shiny designer flats you’re wearing for the first time. The sun is out, but there’s a chill in the air; signs a storm is readily on the way. A bushy-tailed and bright-eyed influencer stops you, tiny mic in hand, and you expect them to start recording one of those obnoxious man-on-the-street interviews. Instead, he whips out a mirror, shoves it in your face, and asks, “Do you like what you see?”
For currently-working fashion industry folk (hello), that is the question The Devil Wears Prada 2 is asking. Only, they’re explicitly outlining—through an almost two-hour cinéma vérité—that you don’t have a say in the matter anyway. And, yes, light spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.
In the sequel, we meet our favorite Runway magazine editors once more, 20-years further in their careers, and dive into what the fashion magazine industry looks like today. And a large arc of the movie explores fashion journalism as a luxury of the past, inundated by new algorithms, interests, and attention spans. Nigel (played by Stanley Tucci) says, “Runway is now something people scroll through on their phones while sitting on the toilet.”
I sat in a theatre filled with fellow fashion editors and influencers, wanting to almost shout “cut the cameras,” because of the eerily accurate depiction of what it means to love and work in fashion media right now. The movie does its job: a fashion-filled, nostalgia-dipped tour de force of a sequel that truly had a fly-on-the-wall approach to its storylines.
But as I watched, laughing, admiring the Gabriela Hearst Niki Patchwork maxi dress, and lamenting with my magazine colleagues next to me, it was hard not to confront how the fashion industry itself hasn’t necessarily gotten better, despite countless movements trying their best. And, along with the threads of exclusivity, gatekeeping, and complicity of the past we’re still grappling with, comes a new crop of existential threats that pose different types of harm.
We’re reintroduced to Miranda Priestly, and she is still the same Runway matriarch she was when we left in 2006—cold, guarded, and ruthless. She is harmful and toxic, and the opinions and traits that make her that way don’t seem to have evolved—she now just has people who try to help her. Amari (played by Simone Ashley) tries to silence Miranda several times when she makes politically incorrect comments, like asking why the body positivity movement is necessary.
Near the 65 percent marker, the devil in Prada is humanized in a way that defeats the purpose of the fortified emotional coliseum she built to achieve her positioning in fashion. And, I have to say, Miranda Priestly is more interesting as a character if she stays a villain instead, and we own the fact that she was critical, conniving, and did whatever it took to stay at the top. The cost of ambition is ownership of the very worst parts of ourselves.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 also comments on the current Tech Bro boom we’re experiencing, and this was another doozy for me and my peers. The narrative of the Jeff Bezos types who are buying their way into fashion and the arts awakened the entire audience I was with, a touch too on-the-nose for anyone’s comfort. But it also reminded us that while top editors like Miranda will be villains in some fashion creatives’ stories, there’s a larger enemy that is financially ready and willing to drain creativity, and suck the life out of the most vibrant parts of fashion for the sake of proximity to coolness and clout until nothing remains but stale capitalism, reheated into a spectacle in dress form.
The movie, following in line with its other spot-on analyses, shows why these Billionaire Bros verge on inhuman, dismissing the role art and fashion play in our lives, while appropriating it to remain culturally relevant. At one point, we see a teary-eyed Miranda talking with one of them, trying to assess if there is an ounce of empathy in his surgically modified body. (He, unfortunately, reduces the entire country, culture, and history of Italy to a fallen empire with half-demolished buildings and dust-covered artwork.)
No matter the current state of fashion (and the past and present villains circling around it) the movie does force us to remember—via its nostalgia and its mirror—that fashion and art do still shape us. It’s why cerulean is no longer just a color, but a broad-sweeping metaphor anyone, anywhere can use for the sartorial choices we make today. And it’s why the feelings evoked by the film lights a fire in me, reminding me that we’re not done here.
Many non-fashion people will leave their theaters enlivened by a funny, scathing, and heart-warming return to the universe they loved all those years ago. But for fashion people, The Devil Wears Prada 2 forces us to face what fashion magazines are allowed to be today. It is basically our collective exposure therapy, as we sit in existential crisis about what’s coming next and how we move forward, particularly as a Met Gala hosted by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez looms large this coming Monday.
Aiyana Ishmael is the style editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. In her work, Aiyana focuses on the culture of fashion and how it intertwines and shapes the zeitgeist. She is an award-winning journalist from Miami, Florida, and a graduate of the historically Black university, Florida A&M. She is a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30: Media honoree, and her debut romance novella PASSING GAME is set to release March of 2027 (831 Stories/Simon & Schuster).
