Same Devil, worse clothes

If The Devil Wears Prada is about how young women are abused and victimised by the cruel corporate culture of the fashion industry, its sequel is about defending that culture at all costs from the ravages of the modern tech world.

Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who began the first movie aspiring to be a journalist and ended it with a gig at a newspaper, spends the beginning of the creatively titled Devil Wears Prada 2 being fired over text. After giving a viral speech about the value of journalism and journalists, she becomes an easy way for her former boss’s magazine to repair its reputation after they “accidentally” promoted sweatshop-made fast fashion.

Andy is back to working for Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), whose uncompromising, cruel behaviour is central to what made the original film so memorable. But Miranda is not the villain of this film. She isn’t even an antagonist. Her behaviour is so toned down that, if not for Meryl Streep’s still-incredible performance, she would be almost unrecognisable. While the film plays this off as a joke about HR complaints and woke culture, it is not the only way that the sequel transforms Miranda.

Instead of the corporate tyrant from the original, Miranda is recast as a sympathetic figure, with a softer side, who now stands at the mercy of a new class of Silicon Valley billionaires – the new villains of the film.

But with that transformation, the first film’s commentary on the fashion industry’s effect on body image, beauty standards, and the lives of its own employees has all but disappeared. In its rush to position thinly-veiled stand-ins for Jeff Bezos and other tech billionaires as villains, The Devil Wears Prada 2 erases the hard edges of fashion.

The corporate structures and figures which the first film criticised are the sequel’s heroes, battling against tasteless, quarter-zip vest-wearing nouveau-riche men of tech. It’s reminiscent of the way kings, queens and lords, once viewed as tyrants, were repositioned as chivalrous and gallant as feudalism lost its power to a new class of industrial capitalists in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Now that, as former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis argues, those captains of industry are being displaced by a new “technofeudalism” of ultra-powerful Silicon Valley billionaires, they are being repositioned in turn. When a man who is definitely not Jeff Bezos, Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), threatens the future of Runway, his elusive ex-wife, Sasha (Lucy Liu) is the one who saves the magazine.

Positioned as her ex-husband’s opposite, she buys Runway to keep things exactly as they were, complete with the once-villainous Miranda at its head. Threatened with tech-billionaire takeover, the brutal corporate culture of Runway becomes a quaint artifact of a better era, and characters who spent the first movie suffering by its hands fight tooth and nail to preserve it. In some ways, The Devil Wears Prada 2 could be the first major technofeudal film.

The original’s social commentary is not the only thing lost in this sequel.

The fashion is noticeably backgrounded, reduced to set-dressing and brand names, with fewer of the extravagant outfits which made the first movie so iconic.

Miranda is the only character who has noticeably changed in the 20 years between films. Andy remains starry-eyed about journalism and somewhat naïve about fashion, unhappily thrust into Runway as a stepping stone for greater things. Emily (Emily Blunt) is now head of the retail fashion giant Dior, and dating someone who is definitely not Jeff Bezos, but she has an otherwise unchanged demeanour since the first film. Nigel (Stanley Tucci), a fan favourite from the first film, is in the exact same position as two decades earlier, when Miranda sabotaging his attempt to change jobs was a pivotal moment.

This lack of growth over 20 offscreen years could be acceptable if the characters changed or developed over the 119 minutes the audience spends with them. But if anything, they spend the film regressing.

This is most visible with Andy, who started the original film as Miranda’s underling and ended it as a journalist. But here, Andy starts off as a journalist, and ends it once again as a slightly-more-senior underling of her former boss. The final scene of the film features Andy, in an outfit very close to the one she started the original with, being curtly dismissed from Miranda’s office. Right back where she started.

It isn’t all bad, of course. The main cast’s performances are on point, as are most of the jabs at our new tech overlords, and delightful cameos range from Lady Gaga to Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg.

But in an attempt to change with the times, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has lost the heart of the original film. And Andy doesn’t even get to wear her Chanel boots.