Work Won't Love You Back: Greta Rainbow on 'The Devil Wears Prada 2'
For those who’ve seen every Met Gala fit yet crave another fashion fix, the writer reports from Times Square on the sequel’s view of labor, love, and, of course, looks.
If the woman in monogrammed Chanel acid-wash jeans standing on the Regal Times Square escalator had stayed to the right to let me walk past, I might not have missed the first ten minutes of The Devil Wears Prada 2. But fate was such that I was thrust into the sequel of the season without set-up. Settling into the theater’s signature ButtKicker seat, flanked by two of my best girlfriends, I re-met Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in the familiar bar where Adrian Grenier’s widely loathed “disgruntled boyfriend” character worked in the original movie. Disappointingly, my formative celebrity crush was nowhere to be found. Equally disappointing is the fact that Anne Hathaway looks like she has aged no more than two years, let alone 20, since the last film. This is hardly realistic representation for people like me, with frown lines deepening by the day, and Ms. Chanel Jeans, who can’t even walk up stairs.
However, one shouldn’t typically expect realism from a PG-13 film that amassed $234 million from the global box office during its opening weekend. One does not want realism in a film about the state of the media industry, the conflict the reboot chose to tackle. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) told the story of one woman reckoning with ambition against a fantastic landscape of glamour and power. It was complicated: Runway editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) comes off comically cruel, yet brilliant when she explains how Andy’s cerulean sweater slots into the pantheon of fashion history, and fallible when Andy peeks into the privacy of her home.
Streep’s performance was so idiosyncratic and emotionally nuanced that we’ve spent the past decades not villainizing her, but worshipping her. Thus little introduction is needed, and the twentieth-anniversary revival meets the characters on a plane of relative love and understanding. Cheers erupted in my theater at the entrance of former office mean girl Emily (Emily Blunt), now in a senior role at Dior. Nigel’s (Stanley Tucci) previous penchant for insulting Andy’s style feels disingenuous; the girl is dressed in on-trend barrel leg jeans. Instead, themes of moral compromise and mythmaking coalesce not around actual people, but rather the magazine’s parent company: Elias-Clarke, a cipher for Condé Nast.
Any opportunity to deploy the wisdom that “work won’t love you back,” I take. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is hellbent on arguing the opposite. We cheer for these ladies getting to work up until the day their bodies reject the Botox. After years of chasing stories around the world as an investigative reporter, Andy was hired back to Runway to lead the features department. Never mind that September issues are now “as thin as a napkin,” she had an editorial job and was just finding her stride when the CEO of Elias-Clarke dies. His tech billionaire son (a half-zip-clad B. J. Novak) prepares to phase out the production of anything substantive—a.k.a. writing—at the magazine. When Andy laments the situation to her charmless real-estate-contractor love interest (Patrick Brammall), he tells her that consolidation is happening across every industry. “I just can’t accept that,” Andy says. “We can’t just keep sucking the soul out of everything, gutting it and then repackaging it. For what end?” Ma’am, is this not The Devil Wears Prada 2?
The narrative arc around saving Runway is confused and swirling, a simplified Succession subplot in between Milan Fashion Week footage and half-hearted jokes about “woke.” In a sense, the movie is a one-hour-and-59-minute-long commercial. But as commercials sometimes do, The Devil Wears Prada 2 made me cry. Maybe it was the Regal Premium Experience’s Immersive Audio & Visual technology. Maybe it was the fact that I was sharing popcorn with my oldest friend in the world, who was visiting town and who earlier that day showed up at my door with flowers and asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding.
The Devil Wears Prada premiered when she and I were nine years old, coinciding with—and likely directly contributing to—an obsession with high fashion. We enrolled in a fashion design summer camp that I recall mostly consisted of collaging with back issues of W. We watched America’s Next Top Model, Ugly Betty, and Project Runway. Somehow, we maintained relatively healthy relationships to our bodies, which I suspect is because we desired the roles behind the curtain, in order to become puppet masters of real people on a real stage—the ultimate graduation from arranging Calico Critters in a dollhouse.
Of course, New York City was a critical element of that dream. It was once a magical and faraway place for two girls from Seattle. Today we navigated the L to the A with aplomb. While many symbols of creative success have lost their luster in the last 20 years, this damn city still feels, some days, like the greatest one on Earth. A generation of girls was sold on skyscrapers and subways as necessary elements for a fabulous life, a life bigger and more important than the suburban alternative we believed our popular peers were destined for. We couldn’t wait to grow up and reinvent ourselves—the literal plot of another Y2K fashion career film, 13 Going on 30. The manufactured “New York or nowhere” concept is a harder and harder sell amid an affordability crisis, but within the confines of the factory—namely aspirational women’s media—it’s possible to be convinced this is still what you want. The Devil Wears Prada 2 knows this dream and exploits it. Dizzying aerial shots of Manhattan from every angle serve as scene transitions so frequently that I considered adding the city’s tourism board to my list of suspected non-fashion spon-con, joining Simple Mills Almond Flour Sea Salt Crackers, Diet Coke, Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day Hand Soap, and United Airlines.
To be fair, the drones also made it to Milan and Lake Como. The film delights in showing off for the sake of showing off. Yes, we have a Lady Gaga music video between acts two and three. Yes, we have cameos from Donatella Versace, Law Roach, Jenna Bush, Tina Brown, Kara Swisher, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Even the bits that play to nostalgia function as brags about IP. A plucky young screenwriter might identify completely with Andy Sachs, but only Disney gets to decide what becomes of her. Maybe the secret answer to surviving the script’s version of the media industry crisis is “get thyself to Hollywood.” Andy’s $350K book deal won’t last long if she stays in her nouveau riche Cobble Hill condo; rights are where the money’s at.
And yet the glitz running through the movie serves a purpose. At a few different points, the sleek 4K aesthetic is swapped for documentary-style, lo-fi, handheld work to give the illusion of intimacy. Glamour is intoxicating. God, I love beautiful things. I love getting to be around it for a night or two for free, because it’s my job, so I really do understand Andy hysterically wanting to hold onto that while claiming her plight is about the future of journalism. Maybe my tears came because I recognized that I’d “made it.” Maybe they were also mournful tears, because while work won’t love me back, I love it unrequitedly. I love writing, that is—not the current husk of a journalism industry and the scarcity mindset I live with. I don’t want to kiss the feet of an ultra-wealthy patron savior, who in the film arrives in the form of Lucy Liu.
“The Devil Wears Prada was core to what I thought it meant to be an adult woman,” my best friend said. The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives when we are adult women getting married, getting promotions. The fantasy version is much harder to watch.
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