As someone who has dressed like a color blind retiree since childhood, I know next to nothing about couture, modern fashion, or why one designer brand outranks another. Watching The Devil Wears Prada all the way back in the year of our lord 2006, I knew the film really wasn’t “for me,” yet I still enjoyed it as a rare glimpse into a world I will never know. Rewatching it ahead of the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, I still found a lot to like, but also a healthy dose of annoyance.
The original story is familiar: Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a “serious” journalist, lands a job at Runway magazine, a glossy, high-fashion monthly focused on the latest designers and couture. She becomes the second assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the cruel and cold editor-in-chief. Along the way, she falls for the fashion world, navigates a complicated frenemy relationship with first assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt), and finds a true mentor in Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci).
Twenty years later, the four central performances shine. Streep disappears into Miranda — the hushed cadence of her voice, the chilly delivery — even if her relentless monstrousness is exhausting by the end. Despite the film’s attempts to humanize her, she remains objectively a terrible person; the way she treats the people around her (especially Nigel) makes it hard to sympathize with her, even when we do get those flashes of humanity.
But the real era-specific frustration lies in Andy’s personal life. The 2006 script treats her intelligence as a journalist and her emotional maturity as secondary to her mediocre boyfriend, Nate. Played by the pretty charisma vacuum Adrian Grenier, Nate is a mopey chef who constantly runs the gamut between annoyed, jealous, and confused by Andy’s success, yet the script treats him sympathetically. He genuinely, profoundly sucks as a partner, yet the movie highlights his moral compass. When Andy contemplates moving to Boston with him at the end, I found myself silently screaming for her to run away from the handsome boy with the slow, cow eyes.
Don’t even get me started on Christian (Simon Baker), the blonde, well-dressed, slimy-chic journalist she’s immediately attracted to in Paris. He’s startlingly misogynistic, most assuredly a fuck boi, but Andy seems all in. After an ill-advised tryst, Andy acts surprised that he’s a scumbag in the light of day. She’s smarter than that and if the movie had been made today, she would have seen him coming from a mile away.
Luckily, here we are two decades later with The Devil Wears Prada 2, a film that not only fixes the original’s flaws, but also tells a thoughtful story about the death of print media and the internal rot of populist journalism.
Andy returns to Runway after two decades to serve as the features editor after the magazine fails to vet a puff piece on a brand using sweatshop labor. Miranda is still the tyrant-in-chief, but she’s now struggling to keep Runway relevant in an era of TikTok influencers, where glamour has been replaced by algorithms. Nigel remains her long-suffering-in-silence right-hand man and Emily is now a senior executive at Dior.
Every character has lived decades of life since the last film and returning writer Aline Brosh McKenna’s script is intelligent and human enough to treat them like complicated people. Along with returning director David Frankel, The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels less like a legacy sequel designed to pick your pocketbook and more like a reckoning with the state of modern pop media. It’s still catty and filled with more costume changes than a Taylor Swift show, but it truly shines through those same four characters.
Hathaway brings an effortless, weary intelligence to Andy. Blunt finds a softness in Emily, now a mother, that makes her desperation for genuine friendship truly endearing. Tucci remains the “fairy godmother” of our dreams, radiating a winking warmth. But again, it’s Streep who steals the show. She makes Miranda three dimensional in a way the first film didn’t have time for, showing us the loneliness and drive beneath the ice. She’s still awful, but we finally understand why. There is more to the “Devil” than just horns and a pitchfork.
I hate to say it, but I liked “The Devil Wears Prada 2” more than the original. It’s smarter, goofier, and has more on its mind than just Fashion Week. The film abandons some of the glitz that made the original so beloved, which might be a dealbreaker for those looking for glamor rather than a movie that spends much of its runtime on modern job insecurity for writers.
While the film still suffers when it focuses on Andy’s personal life (at least there’s no Nate!), The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of the few sequels that seems to understand its own legacy. It doesn’t try to recreate the early aughts; instead — the moment we see Miranda realizing she can’t be her typical draconian self because of human resources — it mourns those years while looking directly into the cold, glowing screen of the future.
Rating: B+