The Devil Wears Prada 2: From “That’s All” to “That’s It?”

I think an entire generation of ambitious women accidentally got career brainwashed by The Devil Wears Prada.

Not because we wanted to work in fashion.

Because we wanted to become undeniable.

When I was 9 years old, I watched the original The Devil Wears Prada every single day for an entire summer.

At the time, I couldn’t articulate why I loved it so much. I just knew I was captivated by the fantasy of terrifyingly competent adults moving culture around like chess pieces.

When I was 19, flunking college and having absolutely no idea what direction my life was headed in, I did the only thing that felt natural: I locked myself in my room and watched The Devil Wears Prada for three straight days.

And somewhere between cerulean sweaters and Harry Potter manuscripts, I realized something:

I didn’t want journalism.

I wanted the machinery.

I wanted the ambition. The glamour. The penetrating insight. The feeling of being close to people who made things happen. I didn’t care about working at a magazine. I cared about proximity to power.

The first movie wasn't something I watched, it was something I went through. It shaped me.

Because now here I am years later working a Devil Wears Prada job. Executive personalities. Events. Creative politics. Beautiful things being assembled under immense pressure by deeply sleep deprived people pretending not to spiral.

Which is why when they announced the sequel, I immediately became suspicious.

Legacy sequels are dangerous because they’re no longer movies. They’re excavations. They ask you to revisit a version of yourself that no longer exists. And if they get it wrong, suddenly something sacred feels commercialized.

I saw the trailers. The influencer cameos. The brand partnerships. That insane Target collection that would have sent Miranda to an early grave.

And I thought: Oh no.

Then I watched it...

..and here’s the frustrating part: The sequel is smart enough to know exactly why the original worked.

Some of it works beautifully. Nigel telling Andy “forever my girl”? Tears. The downgrade from Dior to Coach? Hilarious. The movie understands nostalgia as architecture.

But what made the original The Devil Wears Prada powerful was never nostalgia.

It was conviction.

Some people think the original movie was about fashion. They weren't paying attention. It was about labor.

Fashion was just the visual language of power.

The original movie understood hierarchy. Taste. Institutions. Competence. It understood that ambition itself could feel erotic.

Not romance.

Competence.

Miranda Priestly wasn’t compelling because she was mean. She was compelling because she was right often enough to justify the terror.

That cerulean monologue stayed with people because it forced viewers to confront something uncomfortable: taste is constructed by powerful people long before the masses consume it.

Andy, on her first day at Runway, walks into that office laughing at an industry she doesn’t respect, dismissing the labor and the people in the room, and Miranda absolutely annihilates her for it.

And she should have.

That was the ideological conviction the movie reinforced. It was magnetic.

The sequel, however, arrives in a completely different world. A world where everybody understands the machinery now.

Because beneath the fashion and callbacks, the sequel is actually about something much darker: the collapse of cultural authority itself.

The movie is obsessed with old guard versus new. Craftsmanship versus optimization. Human taste versus algorithmic taste.

One of the most brutal lines in the film is:

“I used to go to Africa for four months for a Glossier spread. Now I spend two days in Acne Studios creating content for people to scroll past while they pee.”

Ouch…

Way to capture the death of monoculture, the contentification of creativity, and the crippling realization that your life’s work now exists beside ASMR food videos and landfill bound shopping hauls on TikTok.

And then there was this line:

“We can’t keep sucking the soul out of everything and repackaging after it’s gutted.”

That’s every industry.

Media. Film. Music. Retail. Everything gets hollowed out by people who discover you can destroy something beautiful and still keep the logo.

There’s literally a consulting firm storyline in the movie because apparently no modern villain is scarier than a 32-year-old man in a navy vest explaining operational efficiencies.

The movie’s corporate villain being a consulting bro with “streamlining” ideas and dead eyes felt almost too on the nose. We all know that guy now. Every industry has that guy. The guy who looks at something beautiful, culturally significant, emotionally resonant, and goes:“Okay but how do we scale it cheaper?”

Which is why it landed like a knife when Miranda told Emily, “You’re not a visionary, you’re just a vendor.”

That line hurt my feelings personally.

Maybe because I work in marketing and there is nothing more spiritually depleting than clients treating deeply strategic creative labor like you’re delivering printer paper from Staples.

But unlike the cerulean monologue, the sequel never fully lands the punch.

Because it diagnoses modern anxieties without fully interrogating them.

It brings up AI. Burnout. The death of craftsmanship. Institutional collapse. The flattening of taste. The emotional exhaustion of turning your identity into labor.

But then it gets scared of its own insight.

That’s the problem.

The original The Devil Wears Prada understood something the sequel doesn’t:

Ambition has to cost something.

That’s why the first movie worked.

Andy compromises herself. She gets seduced by prestige and proximity and access. She loses parts of herself. The movie allows ambition to feel glamorous while still showing the emotional violence required to sustain it.

And then she walks away.

She doesn’t conquer the machine.

She rejects it.

That ending mattered because the movie respected consequence.

The sequel doesn’t.

Instead, after spending two hours giving us genuinely sharp commentary about dying institutions and capitalism gutting artistry for parts, the movie resolves itself with what essentially amounts to a billionaire fairy godmother...?

I’m sorry… what?

For a movie rooted in deeply modern anxieties, the solution suddenly becomes a fantasy so detached from modern reality it almost feels satirical.

Andy is older now. Smarter. More cynical. She understands systems. She understands that every industry is exploitative in its own special little way.

And then suddenly a benevolent capitalist appears willing to save the institution out of pure love for artistry?

Show me a billionaire anywhere in this country doing something without selfish ambition attached to it.

I’ll wait...

That’s why the ending falls flat. It’s dishonest.

The movie gets so close to saying something devastatingly true about modern ambition, modern labor… and then at the last second it blinks.

It doesn’t fully commit.

It sets up the daunting backdrop of AI anxiety, craftsmanship being replaced by optimization, content replacing artistry…

…and then solves it with a billionaire savior.

Please.

The first movie taught me better than that.

The original sold ambition as glamour while still understanding the cost.

The sequel understands the cost.

It just refuses to make anyone pay it.