The Devil Wears Prada 2 Is A Love Letter To Print And A Warning About Its Fall

The long-awaited sequel to a beloved cult classic for the girlies, The Devil Wears Prada, is finally here. I’m thrilled to report that despite the online discourse surrounding the declining quality of film lighting and color grading since the early 2000s, as well as Anne Hathaway gloating about pressuring the production to hire more size-inclusive models (later clarifying this did not result in the firing of slender models and purportedly created more jobs), this movie was a surprising delight.

It’s a sequel we all thought we didn’t need, and maybe we didn’t, given the first film’s reputational upgrade from glossy chick flick to cult following to cinematic perfection, with time. Looking back, it was like lightning in a bottle. An arguably perfect film. Many will continue to insist this second entry was redundant or worse, regressive, because its gravitational center is arguably not even about fashion. That’s because it has loftier messaging. 

All my doubts were dispelled once I saw what the film was really saying, and boy, does it have a lot to say about the modern world. About what’s been lost, about the futile resistance of creative human enterprise, and the value of raging against the dying of the light. That is, the tension between tradition, the Platonic ideals of art and beauty, and the demands of modernity.

The film explores this through a dialectic of values: tradition and modernity, analog and digital, human creation and automated content, perfection and human fallibility. The film doesn’t know if this fight is futile. In fact, it gives us every indication that it might be. Nevertheless, it asks us to try anyway. To harness the human spirit and refuse to go gently into that good night.

It explores this tension through many different sub-contexts: Andy’s fight for journalistic integrity versus the industry’s push for clickbait and engagement retention, Miranda as evil visionary supergenius versus being squeezed by changing cultural and HR standards, and being held budgetarily hostage by tech bros who want to do away with human artistic creative integrity in favor of streamlining and replacing everything with AI. Out-of-touch billionaire tech mogul Benji Barnes, who is clearly modeled after the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, gloats about this vision. 

These Silicon Valley tech bros are attempting to acquire everything with their outsized buying power and reducing fashion magazines like Runway to its spare parts, gutting everything that made it what it once was in favor of a soulless, bare-bones copy. In between his delusions of grandeur (he wants to build a rocket to fly to the sun and name it Icarus, failing to see the irony), bizarre health fads (he’s “not doing water these days” because he believes it’s poison and there are health benefits to be reaped from operating at an “aqua deficit,” he fails to value Runway for what it truly represents: “a commitment to beauty, artistry, the very best in human innovation.” 

Rather than attempting to jump right back into the atmosphere of the first movie, set in the optimistic haze of 2006—a world so jarringly different from the one we exist in today, it might as well be a fantasy—this new installment addresses the elephant in the room incessantly. Print is dying. Real journalism is beholden to social media clicks and engagement. The entire fashion industry now hinges on an ethos of ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ via product placement and glowing “objective” profiles for advertisers just to stay afloat.

Fair warning: Below, I'll be discussing the plot’s more intimate details, which may contain spoilers.

“No us, no you,” Miranda is reminded by advertisers after her pending promotion from Editor-in-Chief of Runway to Global Head of Content across all Elias-Clarke publications is put in jeopardy thanks to a PR crisis. We’re thrust into the inciting action of the movie when Miranda and Nigel are walking a red carpet for an event, just as a scathing story breaks, threatening to ruin Runway’s reputation. The headlines read “Miranda Priestly FOOLED: Runway publishes glowing article about sweatshop clothing brand.” 

The brand, called ‘Speed Fash’, which is a bit on-the-nose, but nevertheless, “tricked” Runway’s reporters by lying about their working conditions, Miranda claims (but context clues indicate Runway’s reporter failed to do their due diligence). We get an adrenaline-rushing inside look at what it must be like for the higher-ups who have to take the fall for these PR scandals, and at the complexities entailed by going into full damage-control mode. 

Having to be all smiles for the cameras and circling sharks, with little more than subtle body language, Nigel indicates to Miranda’s assistant that she must bypass the press tonight. Once they’re within ear’s reach, Nigel informs her that the story is live and a disaster. “It’s gone completely viral,” and “you’re getting blamed for absolutely everything.” 

The panopticon of social media is its own character in this movie. Miranda’s entire career and planned promotion hinge entirely on how the public responds to her online and whether they can successfully navigate the scandal with the proper optics. She must appease the online mob eviscerating her enough to keep advertisers happy.

Social media is awash with TikToks calling her out-of-touch and irrelevant, memes photoshopping her as Pinocchio and AI images of her as a fast food worker with the text, “Would you like some lies with that?” This latter image was actually painted by a real commissioned artist to pass for convincing AI—an important detail to the film’s throughline that safeguarding human artistic creation is a good in itself. 

It becomes clear rather quickly that the film’s main antagonist isn’t one character but an industry.

As Nigel and Miranda are saving face while the internet is going feral, Andy Sachs is winning a journalism award. Only, she and her entire table are fired by text just before she goes on stage. She takes the opportunity to air out her grievances in place of her acceptance speech, ranting about the changing media landscape. Here, the film sets up what this story will really be about. She tells the room of journalists, “We understand journalism is changing, but it’s still devastating when something like this happens to you.”

Irv calls Miranda to rip her a new one, “We are getting killed online, I am getting angry emails from ad buyers for top-level designers.” Miranda says she’s already been on the phone with advertisers and is meeting with them in the morning, and plans to have a very direct conversation with ‘Fash.’ He tells her not to bother; he’ll fix it, he says, before delivering the veiled threat. “This is abysmal timing. I’m pondering this huge move for you, and this happens.” 

Irv and Miranda are both scrambling to take control of the narrative. Irv, because he’s chairman of Elias Clarke, has to figure out how to claw back any shred of credibility with advertisers pulling out, and Miranda, because without fixing this crisis, her upward career move might be at jeopardy. Irv’s tech bro son, Jay Ravitz, (because there are a lot of tech bros in this movie and they all talk like they're in an episode of Succession), shows him his phone, displaying a viral clip from Andy's impassioned speech, "Because some things still matter more than money. Journalism still fucking matters!"

It’s a lightbulb moment—a fittingly plausible inciting incident to get Andy back at Runway to reunite with our principal characters. Not just because she’s being offered double the salary to run the features department and promised a real budget to tell stories and hire real writers, but because she’s proposed as the random whim of a nepo baby tech bro whose attention is just as easily piqued as it is diverted.

Nigel is still Miranda’s right-hand man. Emily left Runway under mysterious circumstances for Dior. Miranda is still Miranda, only with the rise of workplace HR culture, her biting remarks are blunted by the disapproving sighs and tone policing of her assistant, Amari, and she’s no longer permitted to throw her coat at people. Andy is shocked to see Miranda hanging her own coat, who is seemingly winded by the effort.

Miranda is still venomous and apathetic, referring to body positive models as “body negative” and making inappropriate remarks about models looking like they came from a methadone clinic in New Jersey, or threatening to kill herself when people pitch their uninspiring ideas. That being said, she’s also being neutered by the changing world and the new people who rule it. 

The film explores so many modern ills, including the tension between journalistic integrity and the attention economy, which Andy struggles to navigate. The tension between old and new. We get evocative monologues from Nigel about the fall of print and the rise of digital. “Runway stopped being a magazine years ago.” While they still have a book, no one buys it (which is very much the real situation Vogue and virtually every legacy magazine are dealing with as they shift to modern digital tastes). 

Nigel says, "We are digital, we are downloadable, we are streamable, we're in the ether." Besides a shift to digital, he also describes sad budgets compared to the resources he used to have for dream shoots. "Now I'm lucky if I get two days at Milk Studios to shoot content people scroll past whilst they pee."

It becomes clear rather quickly that the film’s main antagonist isn’t one character but an industry (technology, specifically AI) and its avatars: tech bros. They represent moral nihilists who will welcome humanity’s demise in the name of “inevitable innovation” and efficiency and who have no regard for beauty. It’s a dichotomy of tradition versus modernity, masculine versus feminine, but the film’s conclusion doesn’t seem to be that we ought to value one at the expense of the other. Rather, they are in symbiosis. 

Andy wants to write highbrow intellectual fodder about climate change and other elitist progressive issues, but they aren’t getting clicks or engagement because no one finds them interesting. She confides in her assistant that she's spent her whole career reporting what people need to know, and now she needs to figure out what people want to click. Jin tells her maybe she needs to reconcile the two and figure out how to do them at the same time, "the smart stuff and the fun stuff." If only there were a magazine that did that!

Miranda chides her for failing to “move the needle” with her pieces. Desperate to keep Miranda happy, she lies about scoring an interview with Sasha Barnes, a famous and elusive woman who’s recently divorced from Silicon Valley tech billionaire Benji Barnes, making her one of the richest women in the world. Consequently, following her divorce, she has not agreed to any press in years, making Miranda suspicious that she’s lying about scoring the “holy grail” of exclusives.

With Andy’s resourcefulness, persistence, and many tangentially related contacts, she finally gets Sasha to agree to sit for the interview, and they break the story of her new engagement. It proves to be a huge win that earns Andy an invite to Miranda’s home in the Hamptons for the weekend. Before going, Andy tells her Australian boyfriend that she hopes this role is just a stepping stone to doing real journalism because, as proud as she is of the Sasha story, she’s had to do eleven other stories that day about (what she sees as) trivial trends like coconut water and enzyme peels. 

This push-and-pull dynamic is alluded to repeatedly throughout the film. When she first meets the Australian hunk, she’s touring a luxury apartment she can now afford at the convincing of her friend to check it out. She dismisses it as “everything that’s wrong with the world,” not realizing the man she’s talking to owns the building. With some playful back-and-forth banter, Andy learns that he's a contractor, "not a greedy developer," and the city was planning to knock the building down, so he really saved the building, foreshadowing the lengths they’ll have to go to in order to fight for the preservation of what is right, good, and beautiful, within the corporate structures that confine them. 

The film is winking and nodding at what we're fighting for: not just magazines, but full artistic integrity, human creativity, art itself. 

In the backdrop, Andy’s friend is also trying to convince her to write a tell-all book about what it’s like to work for Miranda Priestley. Andy at first outright rejects this notion, but throughout the film, the temptation grows, and she sends over some pages, though she insists she won’t do the trashy tabloid version—only if it’s “elevated and rigorous.”

Just before Irv is set to announce Miranda’s new role at Elias-Clarke, he unexpectedly collapses and dies. When they all attend the funeral, we become acquainted with one of the film’s main antagonists, Irv’s nepo baby tech bro son, Jay, who does not share Irv’s reverence for fashion or Runway. This guy is the antithesis of Runway, in his “head-to-toe synthetics.” He’s a badly dressed Kendall Roy who talks in bro-speak, is too touchy, and too casual. He’s constantly throwing his proverbial dick around the place, seemingly to overcompensate for the fact that Miranda has largely known him as this little child his father would bring to the office. 

Jay represents cold, calculated, utilitarian efficiency, but also a masculine energy that doesn’t quite care for refinement, elegance, or taste. He immediately brings in McKinsey consultants to talk shop with Miranda, in the cafeteria of all places—a place Miranda amusingly has never heard of. Jay and the consultants bring a “bro” culture with them. One consultant attempts to compliment Miranda by telling her they call her “Miranda Beastly” around the office, because she’s a beast. Meanwhile, Jay is constantly fist-bumping Miranda and keeps referring to everyone as “the guys” before correcting himself: “people.”

Mainly, though, he just doesn't value Runway as a creative enterprise; he's in the business of profit. He tells Miranda the consultants are here to “weigh in on our organizational alignment” and introduces their roles: “operational strategy, financial architecture, digital transformation, user experience, everything.” Miranda, disturbed to be sitting in on such a drab affair, mockingly affirms, “everything,” representing how the tech class is overly concerned with optimization at the expense of craft. 

He slashes Runway’s budgets, leaving departments no room to do their jobs, and implements new company policies that prohibit unnecessary expenses, such as flying first class or ordering private cars. All employees, including Miranda, now have to ride Uber and fly Economy. The company can also no longer afford any employees who have been at Runway for longer than five years, jeopardizing Nigel’s longstanding devotion to Miranda and Runway, at the expense of his own ambitions. 

Andy is devastated when she learns of the planned cutbacks that will effectively decimate Runway. "I can't just accept that, we can't just keep sucking the soul of everything and gutting it and then repackaging it. To what end?” She decides to do something about it by cooking up a secret scheme with Emily, who is romantically involved with recently divorced tech mogul Benji Barnes.

Every time Benji opens his mouth, he betrays what an out-of-touch member of the elite tech class he is. He’s constantly out of place, inappropriately giggling, lacking any knowledge about fashion, and generally embodying a sort of goofy, “Quirk Chungus” persona. He’s characterized as a dorky, socially awkward guy (who was once quite ugly but is now passably “mid” thanks to aesthetic enhancements) who never got any girls in high school but whose wallet is helping him make up for lost time.

The plan is for Benji to offer to purchase Runway from Jay, but Andy doesn’t realize Emily has unfinished business with Miranda and, still feeling slighted from being pushed out of Runway all those years, secretly plans to acquire the magazine for herself and replace Miranda as Editor-in-Chief. This betrayal is foreshadowed by Miranda discussing a painting of The Last Supper with Andy, dropping hints that she knows someone is going to betray her, as she comments on the nature of humans, "at once glorious and fallible,” that we inevitably “deceive and betray one another, let each other down. It's what we're built to do."

Andy is under the illusion that they’re saving Runway and preserving it for Miranda, but Emily is the secret Judas among them. Miranda charges her with being a vendor, not a visionary. The whole ordeal leaves Andy’s moral conscience so shaken that when she receives a phone call from her friend offering her $350k to write a juicy tell-all book about Miranda, she objects with righteous indignation.

The third act takes place, fittingly, in Milan, Italy. As one of the fashion capitals of the world, it feels like an obvious choice. But deeper than that, Italy represents the birthplace of the Renaissance: a cultural, political, and artistic “rebirth” that came out of the rediscovery of classical antiquity and a philosophy of humanism, the unlimited potential of human beings as an end in themselves. The film is winking and nodding at what we're fighting for: not just magazines, but full artistic integrity, human creativity, art itself. 

The final runway show and pre-show dinner will be held in Italy’s Brera district. At this dinner, Miranda is prepared for Benji to make his announcement, but he informs her they’re still ironing out the details. As she sits down, hoping to find some common ground in the form of some Runway traditions being permitted to remain, he responds with disturbing fatalism. "Who knows? The world is changing so fast that sometimes I can't even comprehend it. So tradition? I think the day is coming, perhaps very soon, where Runway won't need models or locations or even designers. It'll all just, you know, be AI.”

It feels like we’ve come full circle following the first film’s more trite girlboss brand of feminism.

This is when Miranda, horrified, searches for some silver lining. "Well, surely some things will stay, she pushes. A commitment to beauty. Artistry. The best in human achievement, maybe." “Maybe,” Benji says, “But look around you. We’re in an ancient city that was one part of the greatest empires that the world has ever known, and now there’s just little traces of it left. The world is about change. That's what human beings don’t understand. The future just comes rushing at us like the lava of Pompeii. And our job is just to let it take what it wants to take. One day, it’s going to come and smother us all. And maybe that’s the way it has to be.” 

Miranda, with tears in her eyes, just says, “maybe,” and excuses herself to walk around Brera in the middle of the night, absorbing the sights of artistry—the shops and architecture—all around her, as it’s all built on a house of cards. Like their fate is so precarious, this might be her last chance to take it all in. This is by far the most moving segment of the movie. A cinematic villain humanized, made to seem like peanuts compared to what we’re up against. Tears filled my eyes, and I felt a sense of common struggle.

In the end, Miranda and Andy manage to pool together their passion and resourcefulness to save Runway, if only temporarily, with the help of a benevolent billionaire, Sasha Barnes, who believes in their vision, making good on Miranda’s long-anticipated promotion. It’s ultimately Jay’s lack of sentimentality that causes him to let go of not just Runway but all of Elias-Clarke in one fell swoop, blindsiding Emily and Benji. 

It’s a happy ending, for now, but they’re really only biding their time, with Sasha promising to be hands off “for now.” In the car ride home from scoring the deal, Miranda lets slip that she knows about the speculative book deal Andy was mulling over and tells her she should write it. Only, she asks her to keep in all the juicy bits about how demanding, impatient, and imperious she is, how much of her children’s lives she’s missed. “Just put it all in there, because people should know there’s a cost,” she says, before adding that she loves working. 

It feels like we’ve come full circle following the first film’s more trite girlboss brand of feminism, in which Andy dismisses criticism of Miranda as sexism and Miranda laments that the tabloids will eviscerate her for yet another divorce, which will affect her children, rather than expressing any regret about her lack of presence in their lives. This time, the film doesn’t champion or moralize Miranda’s career choices. It just stops participating in the illusion that there are no trade-offs and consequently feels more mature.

Andy is incredulous that Miranda believes she would dare write such a scintillating book now that they’re a team. Miranda tells her that, in reality, she just wanted to save herself, and Elias-Clarke happens to be her lifeboat right now. Any ideas to the contrary are just a nice story she tells herself. It’s tonally in keeping with the first film. Miranda bursts Andrea’s bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, rose-colored glasses to give her a reality check. 

Andy insists they can still do good work together. “We have to,” Miranda affirms. They’re in a battle larger than I could have possibly anticipated going into this. It’s an existential battle for human dignity and beauty. They might be destined to fail, but they will die trying. There’s a lot to nitpick about this movie, but what it lacks in narrative coherence and loose ends, it makes up for in its conviction in the indomitable human spirit, and in its quintessentially Evie ethos that humans ought to seek truth and find beauty.