Nearly two decades after The Devil Wears Prada turned fashion into a battlefield of power, precision and impossible standards, its sequel swaps couture for code.
Set in an era of layoffs, algorithms and collapsing newsrooms, The Devil Wears Prada 2 asks a pointed question early on: what happens when taste is no longer the ultimate authority?
The film opens with a strikingly contemporary image. Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway), now an award-winning journalist, is seated at a glittering ceremony when she and her colleagues receive simultaneous layoff texts.
Moments later, she walks up to accept her award and delivers a speech insisting journalism isn’t dead, it is simply being dismantled. It’s a sharp, effective hook—and the film’s most assured stretch.
Andy’s return to Runway is not driven by aspiration this time, but necessity. The magazine she once fled becomes, again, a site of negotiation between survival and self-respect. But Runway itself is no longer the citadel it once was.
Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is firefighting after an editorial misstep triggers social media backlash, while the larger threat looms in the form of corporate restructuring, budget cuts, and AI slowly creeping into editorial processes.
The power dynamics shift quickly. With Irv’s death, control passes to a new generation that sees Runway less as a cultural institution and more as a scalable product.
Emily (Emily Blunt)—now backed by her wealthy partner Benji—emerges as a potential buyer, armed with capital but, as Miranda icily puts it, “not a visionary, but a vendor".
It is one of the film’s better lines, cutting to the heart of its central tension: can money and metrics replace instinct?
Benji, for his part, becomes the film’s mouthpiece for inevitability. Change, he argues, is constant: empires fall, industries evolve, and AI is not a threat but the next logical step. The analogy is heavy-handed, but effective enough to frame the conflict.
What the film does well is resist turning this into a simple good-versus-evil binary. Even Miranda, the high priestess of taste, is shown wavering—at one point contemplating walking away rather than bending to a system she doesn’t recognise.
Yet, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is less interested in dismantling its icon than in restoring her. The eventual resolution, Runway finding a “right” buyer who allows creative autonomy, feels a little too convenient for a film that begins in such a morally ambiguous space.
Giving out the climax beforehand spoils the joy of watching it unfold in the moment.
The messiness of the media landscape is tidied up into a reassuring conclusion where the old order, slightly bruised, still stands. What anchors the film despite this is the dynamic between its three leads.
Hathaway plays Andy with a quiet weariness that comes from having seen both ambition and disillusionment up close. Blunt’s Emily is sharper and more pragmatic, though the film stops short of fully interrogating her choices.
Streep slips back into Miranda with ease, her restraint doing more work than any monologue. In one telling moment, she reveals she knew Andy had once been offered a trivial gossip-writing job, reminding her (and us) that she has always seen more than she lets on.
Stanley Tucci’s Nigel remains the film’s emotional ballast; his role is more than supportive, it is more transformative this time.
For all its timely themes (AI, layoffs, and digital backlash), the film ultimately plays it safe.
It flirts with the idea that institutions like Runway may no longer matter in the same way, but stops short of fully confronting that possibility. Instead, it settles for a compromise, that is evolution without loss of control.
It also explains why Miranda Priestly endures. In a world increasingly run by data, The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes a familiar, if comforting, argument that taste, however elitist, still has a place. It is also a timely sequel that is totally gripping, absorbing and highly entertaining.
Film: The Devil Wears Prada 2
Director: David Frankel
Cast: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci
Rating: 4/5