A Million Girls Would Kill For This Job. Now, AI Might Take It.

The gasp was instant. Its swiftness wasn't what made it so distinct, though, only that it was louder than the other gasps, in a media preview peppered with a thousand of them. The media preview in question was for The Devil Wears Prada 2, and the gasp was in response to a conversation about layoffs at Runway, the media behemoth run by fiction's top Editor-in-Chief, Miranda Priestly, inspired in part by the very real and legendary Global Chief Content Officer of Condé Nast, Anna Wintour.

The dialogue that elicited this hoo-ha was something along the lines of "they are going to cut the Features department, they always cut the writers first." That, for many in the audience, hit too close to home. But even that came second to the 'wait, is this play about us' commotion that was caused when a billionaire tycoon stated that aiming for excellence in beauty, culture and art – which magazines document and advocate for – was subject to change. And anyway, maybe soon enough, models, photographers and artists would not even be required. Their jobs, the business magnate claimed, would be done by AI. The nerve!

Directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, The Devil Wears Prada 2 takes place twenty years after the events of the 2006 cult hit film, The Devil Wears Prada. The sequel sees Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci reprising their roles, with names like Lucy Liu, Simone Ashley, Justin Theroux, BJ Novak and Kenneth Branagh joining the cast. There are also many notable guest appearances – Lady Gaga, Donatella Versace and Marc Jacobs, to name a few.

The first film felt larger than life. A grand, once-in-a-lifetime spectacle on the twin worlds of fashion and media. The music, the outfits, the lifestyle – it was something the majority of the world hadn't ever seen, much less experienced. The 'cerulean blue' monologue entered our cultural lexicon immediately, Streep's Miranda Priestly became a queer icon and myriad iterations of 'that's all' began to be used by the aspiring Anna Wintours of the media world.

Compared to all that, this outing feels a tad claustrophobic, like a life-sized story that's too big for the iPhone it's been delivered to. But that is perhaps also because the world today is so much more different from what it was in 2006 – everything is so accessible, so instant. The allure of magazines, along with their readership, is fading. The mystery that fashion and cinema generated has been reduced to a scroll or, worse still, a swipe. The Runway of 2026 is a magazine cosplaying as Norma Desmond, going: “I am BIG. It's the pictures that got small”.

The film successfully manages to capture this change in our world.

At times, The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels less like a feature film and more like a docudrama on the world of fashion magazines today. Budget cuts. Layoffs. Clicks being prioritised over conversation. The takeover of the suits and their full-throated endorsement of AI. Shoots and interviews that, a decade ago, were done over the course of a week, now being wrapped up in four hours. Five, if you are lucky. 

Meryl Streep, of course, is phenomenal. All her lines land just right. Her return as Miranda Priestly is most welcome. Stanley Tucci is always a pleasure to watch; his solution-oriented, calm and mentorly personality is always cherished. Anne Hathaway's Andy Sachs may have travelled the world and reported on everything from politics to civil rights for 20 years, but the minute she enters Runway again, she's 21 – bright-eyed, stubborn, and determined to fix whatever's broken. Some of the best lines in the film are reserved for Emily Blunt, whose Emily Charlton is just as sharp-tongued as she was two decades ago.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is an enjoyable film. Breezy, well-paced, and most importantly, fun. It's filled with if-you-know-you-know moments that will land especially well if you belong to the media and fashion fraternities. But it is also, in its own way, a film about heartache – for print, for superstar editors, for a world where journalists wrote about things that mattered even if they didn’t necessarily go viral. Will it command the kind of patronage the first film did? Perhaps not. But it might just make you mourn the world it's eulogising. And that is certainly no small thing.