Viewpoint: Why The Devil Wears Prada 2 will not be the cult fashion film that the first was

SINGAPORE – When The Devil Wears Prada (2006) was released, reviewers – mostly male, probably straight – were quick to call it “flattire”, a then-faddish word for an ersatz satire.

The film’s parade of killer coats and scary glamazons, uniformly clever and beautiful, deferred to the very industry it claimed to skewer, they argued.

What the blinkered male critics did not realise was that a love-hate relationship with fashion is core to the rag trade’s appeal. The viewer is tugged along with schlubby assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), as outsiders seduced by the haughty fashion machine personified by her boss, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor of Runway.

Since then, the movie has become a cultural touchstone, endlessly streamed, quoted and credited as the catalyst for careers in fashion.

But while the sequel ups the ante on flash, with liberal sequences of real-world fashion shows filmed in Milan and celebrity cameos that blur the line between fact and fiction, it is unlikely to be the cult fashion film that the first was.

This is, in part, because of its grim realism.

Twenty years on from the events of the first movie, the central quartet of actors – Hathaway, Streep, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci – are reunited in a magazine landscape cut down to size.

Andy is now an award-winning investigative journalist who gets laid off over text, then recruited as features editor at a scandal-hit Runway to claw back its credibility.

Miranda is mute and agreeable before her former assistant-turned-Dior executive Emily (Blunt), whose advertising dollars prop up the magazine.

A fashion show is at risk of proceeding without music due to budget cuts, and the company is at the mercy of billionaires. “Remember when magazines were a thing?” smirks Emily.

An industry on its knees

This is all gratingly true to life. Global media company Conde Nast – the real-world counterpart of Runway publisher Elias-Clarke – announced in April the closure of women’s health magazine Self after 47 years, and American Vogue has had its monthly run cut to eight print issues a year. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sponsored the 2026 Met Gala on May 4, renewing rumours that he could buy Conde Nast, American Vogue’s parent company.)

Big-budget photo shoots and expense accounts have dried up, while for many, social media has lapped legacy fashion publications in terms of reach and appeal.

To see it on screen is bruising stuff for anyone in the print business, but its greater effect is to strip away the glamour of fashion media, that minor corridor of power which in the first movie stood for ritzy career ambition.

This is fatal for its legacy points when you remember that The Devil Wears Prada is primarily a workplace dramedy, one predicated on a millennial fantasy: If you work hard enough, you will get your dream job.

Though the 2006 film has Andy walking away from the fete after an attack of conscience, it still argues persuasively that dreams come true in fashion.

In 2026, the satisfactions of that business have broken down.

Fans of the original thrilled by the taste-making power of Runway will find that curtailed. When the magazine throws a Met Gala-esque ball themed Spring Florals – the same cliche Miranda sarcastically panned as “ground-breaking” in the first movie – it feels like an elegy to good taste and another sign that the gatekeepers must now bow to the mainstream.

The follow-up goes farther into the inner workings of editorial coverage. In a one-sided negotiation, Emily easily wrangles five pages in the next issue and social media shoutouts for Dior, revealing the extent to which fashion glossies are shaped by corporate profit motives, no different from more banal products.

Bland looks

This realist tone seeps into the costuming. Costume designer Molly Rogers puts Andy in a procession of recognisably millennial pinstripes and random ties, presumably to telegraph “girlbossery”. She wears her clothes high-waisted and fastened with slender belts, exactly like a 40something colleague would.

Miranda vacillates between the wan and wacky, going from predictable monocolour suits to the micro-indignity of a Dries Van Noten jacket overwhelmed by tassels, in the vein of a funky aunty.

These kits are believably corporate, but fall short of the narrative power and strict good taste of the first.

Who can forget Andy swanning into the offices in thigh-high Chanel boots, as she transforms from frumpy geek, partial to lumpy sweaters, to clued-in fashionista, newly awakened to ambition?

Rogers has said that virtually all designer brands fought to dress The Devil Wears Prada 2, aware that the sequel would give them “best in the world placement”. Its long list of partners includes Dior, Mercedes, Tiffany and L’Oreal. By contrast, the industry famously shunned the first movie, for fear of incurring the ire of then American Vogue editor and Miranda blueprint, Anna Wintour.

Wintour, who for years distanced herself from the 2006 flick, has also embraced the sequel, milking the release in a joint American Vogue cover with Streep in May.

There is a sense, then, of the reboot lacking the critical distance of the first that produced looks – so many pageboy caps! – still talked about today.

In a way, the nonplussed reaction to the fashions of the follow-up is a meta commentary on too many advertisers spoiling the soup, much like how fashion magazines’ increasing slavishness to brands eats away at their quality.

The threat of influencers, increasingly seen as the more relevant fashion authority, is also skirted, with none of these easily offended power brokers represented in the movie.

Even so, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a global box-office success, earning US$234 million (S$297 million) – more than double its budget – over its opening weekend. It should easily surpass the original’s overall US$326 million run within days.

But perhaps the single biggest reason why Part 2 will not go down as a fashion classic is because it is not really about fashion at all. The world of la moda is only the setting for returning writer Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel to advance the real story: the decline of institutional excellence in a digital age.

Frankel told The New York Times the movie’s primo focus is the demise of print journalism rather than the fashion industry. This dirge for traditional media takes the value of fashion for granted, doing away with 2006’s memorable defences of clothing’s importance, as in Miranda’s speech on how Andy’s cerulean blue sweater “represents millions of dollars and countless jobs”, or her deputy Nigel’s (Tucci) line on how good clothes are “greater than art, because you live your life in it”.

The closest you get here is an impassioned but unproven assertion (in the movie at least) that “journalism still f***ing matters”.

Like the sequel’s professed love for fashion, it is an honourable, if underexplored, sentiment.