There’s to be a follow-up to the film The Devil Wears Prada, with original screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, “in talks” to provide the script. The 2006 comedy, starring Anne Hathaway as Andy, the put-upon assistant to Meryl Streep’s glacial New York fashion magazine editor, Miranda Priestly, was an enormous global hit (taking $327m at the box office). As well as the planned sequel, there’s a stage musical opening at the Dominion theatre in London’s West End at the end of this month, starring Vanessa Williams as Priestly, with music by Elton John. Almost two decades after the original, it appears the franchise has been reawakened, but so too have the problematic issues surrounding it.
The first point to be made about The Devil Wears Prada is that it was, to employ fashion vernacular, fabulous, darling! Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, a thinly disguised account of her time working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at US Vogue, it was a genuinely witty film about fashion which, save for Ben Stiller’s sublime Zoolander, are surprisingly rare. Curiously, for an industry teeming with big characters, cinematic takes have tended towards the laboured (Robert Altman’s 1994 Prêt-à-Porter), the misfiring (2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic) and the downright dreary (Daniel Day-Lewis’s designer moping about like he’d swallowed a pin cushion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018).
Bright, sparky, acid, glamorous, The Devil Wears Prada not only tiptoed in Louboutin heels past all the usual pitfalls of fashion cinema, it served up vivid characters: Hathaway’s beleaguered ingenue; Emily Blunt’s patronising Emily, and Stanley Tucci’s gay fashion maven – roles that turbo-launched their careers into orbit. Streep’s chicly vicious Wintour-esque turn as Priestly won her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
Moreover, the film was ultra-female: written by a woman, based on a book by a female author, built almost entirely around memorable female characters – none of which should be discounted when Hollywood still tends to view “women’s films” with suspicion. There’s much to admire about the comedy. But then it comes to the eating.
Too often, the attitudes to body standards seem stuck in a sizeist dark ages. In one scene, Andy deprives herself of a grilled cheese sandwich to fit in with the fashion set. In another, Emily talks about her new diet: “Well, I don’t eat anything, and, when I feel like I’m about to faint, I eat a cube of cheese.” And, so on, all played for giggles.
It’s wince-making: reminiscent of the 1970s when women were hypnotised into dining on cottage cheese and lettuce leaves to achieve some mythical perfect shape. Even as a satire, The Devil Wears Prada tapped into size anxiety, making the objectively slim Andy fuss about her perfectly normal appetite. While Andy wasn’t anorexic, she personified that low-grade eating disorder (not unease about eating too much, just about eating) that too often passes for “normal”. Andy also represented (without the film seeming to realise it) how much fashion/fashion publishing has contributed to that pressure over the years.
Even accepting The Devil Wears Prada as a film of its time, there were no attempts to counter the size-zero tyranny of the early 00s, when the likes of Nicole Richie staggered around with cavernous sack-like handbags to make themselves look (hurrah!) even thinner. Its own mania for skinniness was so amplified, it arguably glamorised and normalised disordered eating, as much as lampooning it.
It would be one thing if this was no longer a problem in our switched-on, size-inclusive times, but it seems all is not well in the arena of body positivity. Recently, there have been complaints from alarmed fashion editors about the return of super-thinness to the Ozempic-infested catwalks. Reportedly, there are visibly skeletal models, some with the hairy arms that are an anorexic “tell” that the starved body is trying to heat itself. Vogue Business’s latest size-inclusivity report says: “The body positivity movement has lost steam in mainstream culture as the pendulum has swung back to the glamorisation of thinness.”
So much for #bodypos – it seems that the vogue for emaciation was just lying low, waiting for the lip service to size inclusivity to pass. Is this the fault of The Devil Wears Prada? Of course not. It isn’t even just the fault of the fashion industry. From influencers to TikTok, this poison has spread deep into the cultural water supply. The question for The Devil Wears Prada concerns the changed climate it will be returning to: whether, for instance, the gen Z audience would be in any mood for “not eating” jokes, should they be included.
Another area that might clash with gen Z attitudes is how hard the original film pushes what could be described as the “corporate abuse masquerading as professional audition” theme: newbie Andy grovelling around Miranda Priestly. All of which looks somewhat jarring, nearly two decades later, when younger generations have been routinely interning for next to nothing, or zilch, conned into working for the exposure or experience. And even these young people are viewed as the “fortunate” ones who have the connections and the family backing to work for next to nothing. While previous generations also “paid their dues”, this was seen as the nursery slope to professional life, not the whole ski jump.
Enter gen Z: renowned for having a “bratty”, entitled attitude in the workplace, but who can blame them when they’ve seen how previous cohorts have been exploited? To put into this context, is the fashion greenhorn who just wants to breathe the fragrant air of the hallowed corridors of style, and who would do anything for a pair of Marc Jacobs shoes from the fashion cupboard, out of date? Are young people too clued up and angry these days? However aspirational the fashion world remains, if the sequel includes a young person, they can’t be anything like Andy.
There are other quibbles with The Devil Wears Prada. In Priestly, it delivers yet another strong screen woman who’s basically a monster. You have to wonder why so many powerful women in cinema are reduced to the level of Disney witches. As the sequel is reported to deal with Priestly on her uppers, forced to kowtow to the newly dominant Emily, might this mean there’ll be some humanising insights into sexist-ageist pressures?
Likewise, the Tucci character – the amusing gay man, basically follows the template set by Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding in 1997. Admittedly, I rather enjoy these performances, but still, in 2024, is this the only way gay male characters can get screen time? This would also be the time to complain about Andy’s boyfriend, Nate, who spends most of the movie belittling her supposedly trivial career, yet is somehow upheld as the voice of (mansplaining) reason. However, a quick glance around reveals that people are already on to Nate as the film’s true villain.
Finally, there’s us – the public. How are we going to watch the sequel? Still lazily waving through sexism, sizeism, ageism and stereotypes, so long as the clothes are snappy and the jokes good? The Devil Wears Prada was a smash hit before fashion and the wider world corrected itself. It appears to be returning just as some of the bigger problems associated with the film entrench themselves again.
It was a miracle the first time how they managed to make such a great comedy movie out of the fashion industry – where so much of it just isn’t funny. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off again.
