Sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows the world has moved on

By Staff Writer Kayla Li

There is a version of fashion tyrant Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep)  that the original The Devil Wears Prada never had to reckon with: the one who loses. Not to a rival, not to a protégée, but to something more diffuse and therefore humiliating: a media landscape that has simply stopped requiring her specific kind of terror. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in this version of the world, and Meryl Streep, to her considerable credit, does not play it for sympathy. She plays it as a woman who understands what is happening and refuses, on principle, to pretend otherwise. It is the funniest performance in the film, and, less noticeably, the saddest. 

The original The Devil Wears Prada understood fashion as a theater of absolute power. The sequel understands it as a theater of managed decline — which is a more interesting subject, arguably, though the movie only intermittently has the nerve to follow where it leads.

The film starts off with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) laid off from serious journalism. The industry that was supposed to vindicate her flight from Runway — the high-fashion magazine where she once worked as Miranda’s assistant — has curdled into the same churn she escaped: clicks, engagement metrics, and content. With nowhere else to turn, her return to Runway, now answering to a billionaire tech-media conglomerate that speaks exclusively in the language of disruption, is framed as both capitulation and survival, and for a while, the movie earns that ambivalence. 

Hathaway is excellent here, wearing Andy’s new confidence like a well-broken-in coat, and her chemistry with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), now a formidable power broker on the brand side of fashion, generates the film’s best energy. Their dynamic has reversed beautifully: where once Emily sneered down at Andy from her gatekeeping perch, the two now recognize each other as professionals cut from the same fraying fabric. Their reunion works because both women now understand the compromise beneath it: neither fully believes in the industry anymore, yet both remain trapped performing competence within systems already decaying.

The film never quite lives up to its own ambitions. It knows, at least conceptually, that Miranda’s terror was never just vanity but a kind of violent insistence on quality in an industry that would have preferred comfortable mediocrity — and yet it never musters the nerve to fully follow that argument. The romance subplot is decorative and chemically inert; the callbacks to the original range from pleasurably fan-serviced to visibly desperate. The fashion, which should function as the film’s visual argument — costume as character, clothing as power — is instead uneven in ways that feel more like a failure of nerve than a directorial choice. Some scenes where fashion takes center stage retain flashes of the original film’s precision, while others resemble an expensive but curiously lifeless campaign spread. And where the original’s famous opening montage between the fashionable and the mundane had an argument embedded within it, the equivalent passages in the sequel are pretty and forgettable, stitched together like a particularly airless aggregation.

But the deepest failure is the ending. Streep does extraordinary work in miniature — and the small humiliations she is asked to absorb really land —  but the screenplay too often protects her from full vulnerability. It then rescues the whole apparatus with a third-act resolution involving a good billionaire whose benevolent intervention in the journalism crisis reads as something between a fantasy and a shrug. The film’s most damning contradiction lies in the fact that it spends ninety minutes building an argument about structural rot: institutions hollowed out by corporate consolidation, taste flattened into content strategy, and authority replaced by analytics.  That argument is then dissolved in the final twenty. The proposed solution is not that institutions can be saved by collective effort or cultural reckoning, but rather that they can be saved by the correct wealthy patron. The film mistakes this for pragmatism when it is really just naivety. 

And yet there is something in this movie — in its awareness that the thing it is nostalgic for is already gone, that Runway and serious journalism and the specific kind of terrifying women who ran them, are artifacts of a world that algorithm has quietly eaten — that message resonates beyond its execution. The question the film leaves unresolved is whether its hollowness is intentional, whether the movie recognizes that nostalgia itself has become another marketable product, or whether it simply stumbled into resonance by accident.

The answer is probably somewhere in between. That ambiguity ultimately becomes the sequel’s most honest quality. Like the institutions it elegizes, The Devil Wears Prada 2 survives through style, professionalism, and muscle memory, still capable of producing moments of genuine beauty, still moving elegantly in the direction of its own irrelevance, and still ringing faintly enough for the faithful to hear.

Grade: B