Apart from technology, few things date in movies as quickly as fashion. This explains why the outfits in The Devil Wears Prada 2 feel as fresh as the clothes from the spring 2025 ready-to-wear collections seen on screen.
It’s positively vintage and not in a good we-are-saving-the-planet way.
Having indulged in the film’s previews and viewed Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway’s endless press tour, I was ready for a fashion revelation to rival Zoolander or The Triangle of Sadness. Instead, this felt like the final season of the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That….
Remember that? Neither do I.
Where were the gasp-worthy moments, like Hathaway’s character Andy Sachs wearing those Chanel boots in the original film? The best outfit in this movie – a tasselled Dries Van Noten jacket, worn by Streep’s magazine editor Miranda Priestly – probably wouldn’t make the cut for Netflix’s Emily In Paris.
When Andy wears a loud, colour-blocked maxi dress from Gabriela Hearst in a sea of blue and beige at a lunch in the Hamptons hosted by Miranda, it’s meant to feel bold and edgy. The dress, shown on the runway in September 2024, looks like it came from online reseller Depop rather than Runway magazine’s fashion closet.
The red Balenciaga ballgown Miranda wears emerging from a black van and the pieces worn by Emily Blunt’s character Emily Charlton, a Dior executive, generate that same flat fashion feeling. Those Dior pieces were created before new creative director Jonathan Anderson reinvented the brand, leaving Blunt stuck in the past.
The Devil Wears Prada was released in 2006. Twenty years is a long time in fashion. The style success of television shows such as The White Lotus and All’s Fair, along with our phones delivering hourly updates of international runway shows, has threatened the franchise’s insider status.
While the original Devil Wears Prada offered insights into trends, with the legendary cerulean blue monologue, the power of editors and the rarefied atmosphere of luxury events, there’s little today’s audience doesn’t know. Instagram and TikTok have created a generation of experts who can immediately recognise that the movie’s central runway scene in Milan has the authenticity of a $50 Hermes Birkin bag bought in Bali.
When Blunt’s character delivers industry insight into how luxury labels dictate the content of fashion magazines, there is a brief glimpse of the original’s edge.
Where the movie really fails fashion is in its depiction of handbags. Hathaway’s character regifts her supposed best friend a Valentino bag that looks like it was squashed at the bottom of a suitcase. You can understand why the luxury house was giving it away.
The movie suggests that this unattractive bag is what we should aspire to, and then snarkily criticises the more affordable US brand Coach in its script.
A real fashion insider would prefer the quality of a Coach bag – but quality is clearly not the focus of this fashion fantasy.
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