For some reason I thought I could have fun at The Devil Wears Prada 2.

By Annelise Ogaard

The original 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada is a classic of the slumber party canon, a campy dramedy starring Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, a young journalist trying to make it in the big city after college, who lands a job as the second assistant to Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the icy and demanding editor-in-chief of Runway Magazine. As Andy vacillates between trying to withstand the petty cruelties and palace intrigues until she can find a better job, and attempting to prove herself worthy to Miranda, the quips, and the clothes, and the chemistry between Streep and Hathaway put the film among hits like Clueless, Legally Blonde, and Mean Girls. 

I went into the sequel with low expectations, hoping for a little frivolous fun, and curious to see where exactly they were going to take this thing, since the first film left so little unresolved. The plot takes place literally right now, opening with the preparations for The Met Gala. Outside of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, workers roll out the blue carpet beneath banners announcing the event’s theme: Spring Florals, a callback to one of Miranda's withering and frequently memed put-downs: “Florals for spring? Groundbreaking.” 

The script recycles every single joke from the original film, and cribs plot points. Anne Hathaway gets yet another makeover from her fairy godfather Stanley Tucci. Everyone takes a trip to Europe to conduct subterfuge between fashion shows. The few things that aren’t borrowed are pretty bad.

In the twenty years that have passed since the events of the first film, Andy has established herself as a serious journalist in a world in which that is barely a job, getting laid off right before she accepts an award for her work. Uptown, Miranda arrives at the gala just in time to discover that she’s been canceled for running a story celebrating an exploitative fast-fashion company. The blowback threatens Runway’s future, and Miranda’s publisher hires Andy hoping that her integrity will help repair Runway’s reputation.

Andy has become the kind of person who can wrangle an interview with a reclusive billionairess with a couple of phone calls, yet she’s even more lip-bitingly, stammeringly awkward than she was as a recent grad. Her doe-eyed earnestness is one-dimensional and grating.

A Sidney Sweeney cameo was apparently cut from the film at the last minute—woke’s back, baby!!—but the two-hour runtime is still baggy with false starts. A couple of stock quirky Gen Z assistants (including the internet’s sweetheart Caleb Hearon, wasted here) appear and disappear. Andy has a blandly supportive new group of friends, as well as a frictionless, zero-stakes, zero-chemistry romantic subplot with an understanding and age-appropriate man who is, visually speaking, a massive downgrade from Adrian Grenier at the height of his slutty Disney prince prettiness. 

The narrative of the original film was tied to Andy’s perspective, and we saw Miranda through the eyes of her staff, anxiously watching her expressions, interpreting her varying shades of displeasure, seeking out the faintest smile, a flicker of vulnerability. Lingering on Streep's microexpressions, it’s possible to read Miranda as a demanding visionary who views Andy with a kind of tough-love, or an entitled narcissist indoctrinating her into her own cult of personality. She’s the antagonist, but too complex to be a bad guy.

The sequel ditches Andy’s POV in favor of an aimless omniscience, and delivers a real devil in the form of the tech billionaire Benji Barnes. Justin Theroux plays the villain with the yakked-out dweebiness of Elon Musk, but Barnes’s backstory is plainly based on Jeff Bezos. Rebounding from a high profile divorce, Barnes’s attempt to buy Runway Magazine as a gift for his new girlfriend mirrors last year’s rumors that Bezos was purchasing Condé Nast.

The stakes here are large and impersonal. The future of Runway hangs in the balance, imperiled by an AI optimist who blithely compares the future to the eruption that smothered Pompeii. The conflict is culture against crass commerce, human ingenuity against corporate slop—and a fictionalized version of Anna Wintour’s Vogue makes a questionable battlefield for that fight.

The Wordle Factory recently ran a quiz titled “Could You Have Landed a Job at Vogue in the ‘90s?" inviting readers to test their cultural literacy against the copywriters of yesteryear, and their media literacy against the massive PR campaign for this very film, and the revisionist history of Vogue as a cultural standard bearer.

We still remember the big mistakes. That one profile of Asma al-Assad Condé Nast tried to scrub from the internet. The time they had LeBron James pose as King Kong for some reason. Wintour’s Vogue was reactionary, but it was more often deeply boring. 

As editor-in-chief, Wintour’s biggest innovations were the practice of reserving the cover for A-list celebrities instead of models and green-lighting Teen Vogue, which, from its early issues documenting the bedrooms of teenage heiresses, to its role on The Hills employing Lauren Conrad and Whitney Port as interns, to the day Condé Nast pulled the plug on it for getting too commie, had an absolutely generational run, making adult Vogue look even more staid and stale in comparison. Vogue’s formula was advertisers’ clothing on famous frames and faces, and Wintour stuck to it like a bob on sunglasses. 

Wintour showed far more creativity off the page, in the short-lived Fashion’s Night Out, an event that pioneered the concept of a brand activation long before the general public was lame enough to form breadlines for matcha, and in her crowning achievement, The Met Gala.

Wintour did not start The Costume Institute Benefit, but by taking cues from the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, and advantage of the rise of social media, she turned a museum fundraiser into the blue carpet to end all red carpets, a kind of Super Bowl for theater kids. 

The primary sponsors of this year’s spectacle are none other than the ghastly Jeff and Lauren Bezos, a couple whose inherent "banned from a strip club" energy defies glamour. Despite the onscreen clash between their fictionalized alter egos, Wintour let Jeff stick Lauren on the cover of Vogue the way a less wealthy divorced guy might cast his second wife in the commercials for his car dealership. Culture and crass commerce get along just fine, it turns out.

If The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels phoned-in, it’s because what happens onscreen is besides the point. The film already happened in the commercial tie-ins with companies like Starbucks, Samsung, Google, Mercedes Benz, etc, in the limited edition novelty popcorn bucket shaped like a purse that AMC is selling for $39.95, in general awareness for Vogue, which is no longer a magazine, or a website, or even a big, glitzy event, but a brand, endlessly promoting itself.

As a film, it’s a bore, but the synergy is fantastic.