I was pleasantly surprised by The Devil Wears Prada 2. The first film is an iconic entry in women-centric corporate drama, so the sequel arrives under enormous pressure. That original was a fish-out-of-water story: a girl thrown into the titular Devil’s Den, learning to survive the merciless corporate world of journalism draped in Gucci, Prada, and Dior. Two decades later, we find the same characters facing far more complicated versions of the same fight. Andy Sachs is navigating layoff anxieties and career decisions that could make or break her; Miranda Priestly is being forced to accept that the industry is changing faster than she can manage. Beneath the glitz and glamor of Runway is a dying industry, trampled by technology and by the great migration of attention from paper to digital.
The corporate drama itself is handled really well. The conversation between Andy and her Aussie boytoy felt genuinely real, that particular helplessness of understanding a business will spare no one when the budget gets cut, while still being terrified for your own livelihood. It’s tempting to think this kind of uncertainty is unique to a shrinking industry like journalism, but it’s happening across every field, including mine. Watching that conflict rendered with this much seriousness and humanity was quietly moving.
From there, the film widens its aperture, from a single employee’s anxiety to the larger battlefield of ownership and leadership. Miranda, for all her experience and composure, still has to answer to Ryan (of The Office), the new nepo baby boss with so much self-absorbed egotism. The new devil doesn’t wear prada anymore, he’s in a Patagonia vest. I enjoyed the scene where Ryan marshals a small army of McKinsey consultants who used their corporate brainrot words in a dozen different ways to say the same two things: cut budgets, fire everyone. To these consulting types, employees are just numbers, and a number going down is always good news.
So Andy takes matters into her own hands and teams up with Emily, and the film shifts again, this time into acquisition drama, with a Silicon Valley billionaire squaring off against a coldly transactional finance guy. The billionaire is the platonic ideal of the techbro: tasteless, boastful, atheistic. My favorite scene in the entire film is Miranda confronting him about the industry’s need for actual artists and journalists, only for him to wave it away: “we’ll just replace that with AI”. He frames the whole transition as “the natural cycle of things,” meaning Runway’s death is simply inevitable.
That scene is staged in the room housing Da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan, and the choice is pointed in the best way. Da Vinci painted with reverence, for God, for the act of sacrifice itself, and by hand produced something that redefined perspective for the entire Renaissance. And here are Silicon Valley billionaires, armed with money and nothing else, insisting their technology has rendered artists and creative expression obsolete. These self-proclaimed iconoclasts believe they’re leading humanity into a post-creative, pseudo-productive future. What they’re actually doing is stripping the rest of us of the agency to think and live for ourselves. (Sorry, tangent from the movie, but it’s something I think about a lot when it comes to the tech industry generally.)
The billionaire/Emily/divorcee subplot reads unmistakably as a Bezos–MacKenzie Scott–Lauren Sanchez allegory. Emily spends the whole film draped in logos, a woman with no personal style of her own, borrowing identity from brand names. Andy, by contrast, closes the film by cutting up her iconic cerulean sweater into a chic vest and wearing it in her own, quietly assured business-casual style… a small gesture, but the one I loved most.
Miranda gets the film’s sharpest conclusion near the end. After the villain is defeated, she acknowledges that Andy is good, and that Andy helped her, and she sacrificed her whole life for her career, which is near its end. But she’s honest that in the corporate world, the person you save is always yourself. There’s no shame in that. It’s simply the rule: every woman for herself, and no room to be sentimental about any of it. She’s made choices in her life, to prioritize her career over family life, for example, and while she doesn’t regret her prolific time at Runway, she does admit she missed out on a lot other stuff. So that conversation did humanize Miranda a lot.