The woman I think of as being the ultimate fashion writer once told me that her greatest professional regret was not learning more history. She felt that her knowledge, which was obviously and impressively far-reaching, only extended back to the 19th century, and that if she had known more about the decades and eras before then she could have been a better observer of, and writer for, the fashion industry. 

For some people, self-imposed standards of achievement cannot be met by even the most tangible accomplishments. This is the difference between goodness and greatness, as far as our cultural narratives tell us: the unrelenting striving for better, for more, distinguishes the acceptable from the extraordinary. “You’re not a visionary,” Miranda Priestly, the beloved antagonist at the center of The Devil Wears Prada—an indelible character who has the potential to replace all other cinematic depictions of fashion editors, and to be associated for all time with the long-serving former editor in chief of Vogue, Anna Wintour—says to the secret villain revealed toward the end of The Devil Wears Prada 2. Like all backstabbers, this enemy thinks they deserve what Miranda has, and will stop at nothing to get it. What is the denouement that Miranda deploys to level this third-act threat into oblivion? “You’re a vendor.”  

Ouch. Few insults are worse in the fashion world than the ones that reveal an acquiescence to the craven demands of contemporary ready-to-wear. Adapting the story first told by Lauren Weisberger in her 2003 novel—widely considered to be a roman à clef of her time as Wintour’s assistant, with the names changed to protect the libelous, if not the innocent—into a charming film version in 2006, director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna achieved what so many in their place aim for and miss. Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci created a trifecta of characters who channeled their real-life inspirations so well that their performances created entirely new archetypes; Hathaway’s clueless, entry-level writer Andy; Streep’s powerfully intimidating editor in chief Miranda Priestly; and Tucci’s warm-but-tough Nigel are as famous as the industry titans and wannabes they were based on. 

The occasion of the sequel (which reteams Frankel and McKenna) has both reified and cheapened this fact of its predecessor. I have lost count of how many advertisements, at the moment of the sequel’s release, reference the first film with uncanny and unpleasant mimicry: from L’Oréal to Google, advertising makeup or LLMs or other allegedly essential yet frequently useless products, every conglomerate wants to profit from a memorable artifact of recent cultural history. 

The Devil Wears Prada 2, as a film, is a fascinating metatext in its own right—an expression of intellectual property that congratulates itself for knowing just enough history to leech a little more profit from the present. Twenty years have passed, and the staff of Vogue–stand-in Runway is floundering while Hathaway’s character, Andy, has achieved her goal from the first film of becoming a serious journalist, which means she just got laid off from a respected newsroom. Through a few convenient machinations, she ends up back in Miranda Priestly’s office and becomes the salvation of a magazine on the brink of collapse. The story the film tells is an easy simulacrum of corny banalities about media: journalism is struggling, tech billionaires are bad except the ones who use their money for good (extra points if they’re women!), the boomers are getting woke now, et cetera. The wardrobe is not even particularly cute. The colors are garish, the patterns are overdesigned, and the loudly placed designer logos are, much like in real life, tacky.  

There’s a bleakness to the hollow satire on display in Prada 2, which seems to believe that a vague or casual gesture to real life is an acceptable knockoff for comedy. The actual cultural moment is watching the people supposedly skewered in the film learn how to adapt and benefit from it. As I write this, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos are hours away from hosting the Met Ball with Anna Wintour, who appeared on the most recent cover of Vogue with Streep as Miranda. Anyone who pays attention to fashion and culture will wonder if Wintour, or anyone at Condé Nast, even saw the new movie, which passively but unsubtly attempts to critique the unholy alliance of media and tech capital with culture and design. 

That probably doesn’t matter. In one scene, Anne Hathaway’s love interest tries to reassure her about her unemployment by pointing out that it’s not just journalism that is suffering from consolidation and excess, but  “bookstores, pharmacies, everything;” even his own real-estate renovation job. But journalism is actually important, she protests. It’s telling that she doesn’t say that about fashion, which is trapped, possibly forever, in a moment of creative directors rather than designers, brands rather than beauty. And if this film is any proof, movies feel stuck in an endless loop of decisions made via data analysis designed to maximize profit. The comparison is too obvious. We have no visionaries to look to, only vendors. Prada 2’s cheery nihilism made me think of the brilliant fashion writer who wished she knew more history. I can see how knowing that the film’s references have a past—their own tales of greed, corruption, betrayal, success, and vision—might be a salve. If I believed the present was all there was to expect, I might never trust in a future. Not everyone will buy what Prada 2 is selling. At the very least, most people will demand for themselves better outfits.