The Devil Wears Prada 2 is capitalist art that hates capitalist art

The Devil Wears Prada is one of the great millennial fairy tales.  

Released in 2006, the year before the financial crisis and Great Recession would come for us all, the movie (based on a novel inspired by writer Lauren Weisberger’s experience working for Anna Wintour at Condé Nast) posits a subversive fantasy: Our heroine Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway) believes that if she can figure out how to work for Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) for just one year, she can have any job in the industry that she wants. In the end, she learns that if you work hard and stay true to your values, you can have a good, well-paying job in New York City that doesn’t require selling your soul or betraying your friends. 

Given the way life has shaken out for many millennials, that story is now a bit depressing — not unlike the way most fairy tales, upon greater inspection, are. But this generation has always wanted to believe that one can have a fulfilling job and fulfilling personal relationships, without having to suffer too much or inflict suffering on the world. And if we did sell our souls and our relationships, it’d actually be for the chicest job on the planet, and a launchpad to something greater. 

Now, some 20 years later, The Devil Wears Prada has returned for a sequel. Like the original, it runs on millennial optimism. But in this installment, its critiques — about money, society, art, commerce, and beauty — have a little less bite. By the time you get to the fairy tale ending, it’s impossible to ignore the creative and economic circumstances that brought this movie into existence, and the fact that when it comes to media and entertainment, a billionaire is lurking in every corner. 

This time, the devil wears Vuori

The pleasure of the original is how sneakily it convinces you of Miranda Priestly’s importance and innocence. As Andy and the audience come to learn, Miranda isn’t a shallow, unreasonable monster; she is both the guiding force behind every single item in our closets and the product of an unforgiving system that not only diminishes women but also undervalues art and beauty, even when it’s incredibly lucrative. Her toughness is the reason she’s survived this long in an industry that simultaneously lauds her but also despises her for being cutthroat and harsh. As the movie posits over and over again, if a man acted the way Miranda does (and they do), they’d be lauded for it. (This type of justification ultimately unleashed a strange kind of over-correction in the real world that we would eventually deem girlbossery.)

The second movie has more explicit targets. 

In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the media landscape resembles our real one. People no longer care about reading stories, and certainly no one wants to pay for them. Accordingly, newspapers, magazines, and digital outlets have had their budgets cut, and journalists, including Andy, are being laid off in swaths. 

A flimsy first act brings Andy to Runway as a features editor, where she finds out that the fashion tome isn’t immune to the ills of the industry. She immediately finds out that Jay Ravitz (BJ Novak), the nepo baby in charge of Runway’s parent company, Elias-Clarke, wants to “optimize” Runway. (In non-corporate media jargon, he wants the magazine to make the most amount of money while running at the cheapest mode possible.) 

Even if the movie were on mute, the villains would be easy to spot. Novak’s Jay is draped head to toe in monochromatic polyester blends, all in various forms of fancy athleisure. He only wears soft pants — the implication being that his life has been so frictionless that his pants must follow suit, and that, despite being one of the most important people in the company, he’s allowed to show up to work in his gym clothes. It turns out, some of the most evil people in the world wear the softest pants. 

Jay hires a squad of consultants, dressed in drab grays and blues, to slash Runway’s spending. Of course, these people don’t know beauty. They work for McKinsey. 

The other loathsome creature of this film is Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux). Benji, according to Runway gossip, is a tech founder who went soul-searching after a divorce from his beautiful wife, Sasha (Lucy Liu). After discovering Botox, hair transplants, and steroids, he found a new fiancé in Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), Andy’s across-the-office frenemy from the first movie. 

Benji has more money than he knows what to do with. So he buys art — Klimts and Monets — and designer clothes and watches, all the stuff with the biggest price tags. It’s only a matter of time before Runway catches Benji’s eye, not because he has an appreciation for fashion or beauty, but because he must ravenously, messily consume it, like a toddler razing their first ice cream cone. 

Between Benji and Jay, Runway faces an existential crisis: become a soulless husk that exists to drive consumerism and shareholder value, or sell itself to a tacky billionaire who will, when he moves onto the next shiny thing, sell it or, even worse, feed it into an AI engine. That’s a relatable, if bleak, reality for many media outlets right now. 

Andy, Miranda, and Nigel (Stanley Tucci) come up with a solution that can only be described as a miracle, one that would never work outside of the slightly lobotomized, fairy-tale world of Runway. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s a better finale than the original, one that feels more spiritually in line with the idea that millennials can hard work their way into salvation.  

How critical can The Devil Wears Prada 2 really be?   

Maybe some moviegoers will more readily accept the movie’s fantasy for what it is. After all, the performances are charming and the costuming sparkles. The social commentary criticizing tech billionaires and nepo kids feels current. But one would be forgiven for not fully buying into the razzle-dazzle, given the marketing campaign and circumstances surrounding the movie’s existence.  Because as much as the film positions mindless consumerism and our capitalist overlords as art’s enemy, it very well might not exist without either. 

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, after all, another sequel brought to the surface from Disney’s bottomless and extremely valuable IP mines. Thanks to an acquisition, those troves are filled with 20th Century Fox’s original material, which includes The Devil Wears Prada. The sequel is the exact kind of movie that entertainment giants and Hollywood executives have enjoyed releasing in the last decade. Those executives, like the movie’s villains, are also probably being advised by beautyless gray ghosts and nepo babies in soft pants too, the kind that excitedly think about AI and how to “streamline” operations (i.e., cutting jobs).  

Studios today aren’t as enthusiastic about taking gambles on films as they once were, especially not mid-budget movies about fashion aimed at young women. They want the financial insurance of existing IP — a toy perhaps. Sequels of beloved films with ardent fanbases are seen as minimal risk. This may explain why this movie contains an unfathomable number of callbacks and Easter eggs to its predecessor while lacking any distinguishing “cerulean” moment. 

What is distinguishable is the marketing and brand tie-ins. Diet Coke (of course, it’s Diet Coke) released specialty cans featuring the movie’s signature red heel logo, and you can apparently order Miranda Priestly’s favorite drink off the Starbucks “secret” menu. The film also, according to CNN, officially partnered with L’Oréal Paris, Smartwater, Samsung Galaxy, Lancôme, TRESemmé, Havaianas, Grey Goose, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany & Co., Dior, and Valentino fragrance.

This business is tough to watch. 

There’s also the matter of Benji and his new fiancé bearing an uncanny resemblance to Jeff and Lauren Bezos, this year’s extremely controversial Met Gala “honorary chairs.” According to the New York Times, the couple were initially just expected to be the lead sponsors of both the event and the exhibition, but this secondary role, which “comes with a place in the receiving line and a position at the top of the Met steps,” was later announced. The film does not legitimize them; there’s an understanding that if they got their hands on Runway, it would be the end. Yet, Anna Wintour, the real-life Priestly, seems to be softer than her fictional counterpart: In addition to the Met Gala, Vogue covered the Bezos wedding extensively and drew backlash for glamorizing a billionaire whose company is known for numerous on-site employee deaths and aggressive union-busting, among other problems. 

It’s not as if the first movie was immune to the realities of capitalism. Miranda’s (and perhaps Anna Wintour’s too) eternal conundrum is that she believes in art and, at the same time, understands the necessity of money to protect it. Capital allows beauty to exist, and its existence within our current system is, according to Miranda, better than it going away entirely. 

But there’s something askew this time around. It’s more difficult to believe the sequel’s “art will triumph in the end” narrative when you’re eating popcorn from a Devil Wears Prada 2 handbag popcorn bucket ($39.95) and when its parent company is the apex predator of hollow mass consumerism. 

Perhaps that’s the real, more depressing, more millennial ending that the first one left unwritten: A movie about fashion, the sanctity of art and creativity, and the importance of journalism is actually the embodiment of millions of dollars in brand deals, an exercise in unoriginality, and was greenlit by soft pant-wearing executives, just like the ones the film warns us about. They’ve already won. And if this charming but bleak sequel makes enough money to make their investment worth it, that’s their happily ever after.