When The Devil Wears Prada first came out in 2006, I went to see it with my dear friend Ed, an art director whom I had met when we had both briefly worked at Mademoiselle in 2000. Sitting in the theater we howled at the deadly accuracy of the film in its portrayal of the peculiar and particular picadillos of women’s magazines.
The plot of the movie was simple: smart girl Andy Sachs, desperate for a new gig, lands an unlikely role at Runway magazine (read: Vogue) and almost immediately draws the ire of her new boss, the icy Miranda Priestly. But after she pulls off a seemingly impossible task, she earns Miranda’s begrudging respect, and after a fabulous montage of fashion discovers Miranda is about to be pushed out. She valiantly rides to the rescue, to discover in the end her own self-confidence, purpose, and path to happiness.
The film was clever, original, on point, and a tour de force for Meryl Streep as Miranda. As someone who worked at several women’s magazines in the early aughts, it rang incredibly true, and its willingness to tip into the absurd norms of that world made me, and anyone else who had survived working at a fashion magazine, feel incredibly seen.
So I was really looking forward to the sequel, which got the old band back together for a stylish encore. Imagine my deep disappointment when the sequel turned out to be simply a pale, badly done copy of the original. Want to hear the plot?
Smart girl Andy Sachs, desperate for a new gig, lands an unlikely role at Runway magazine (read: Vogue) and almost immediately draws the ire of her new boss, the icy Miranda Priestly. But after she pulls off a seemingly impossible task, she earns Miranda’s begrudging respect, and after a fabulous montage of fashion discovers Miranda is about to be pushed out. She valiantly rides to the rescue, to discover in the end her true purpose and path to happiness.
You see the problem.
It’s one thing for a sequel to be derivative, it’s quite another for it to basically be the exact same movie, only set 20 years later. And it all felt so craven and sad this time around. For all of their absurdities, the glossy women’s magazines I worked at were also mad fun. I will always smile that I got to conjure up and edit absurd stories with titles like, “Is Your Boyfriend Secretly a Serial Killer? (Are You Sure?)” and to be part of the pajama party that was a good Dolce sample sale. I drank pink champagne at Gotham and stayed at the Mondrian; I once waited six hours for Christina Aguilera to show up in the Bahamas and spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out a single word that Patrick Demarchelier was actually saying.
The Prada sequel reminded me that era is over, and has been for a long time. I’m not sure I needed that reminder. As Miranda said so memorably in the first film, “I asked for clean, athletic, smiley. She sent me dirty, tired, and paunchy.”
Michael Callahan 