The Devil is Sponsored by Dior: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ in review

Anyone who has been to the cinema at all in the last couple of years will have found themselves asking the question: “Why does everything look like that?” This feeling is especially palpable when you’re watching the exact same scene from 20 years ago, desaturated. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with Andy (Anne Hathaway) brushing her teeth in the mirror, a perfectly unsubtle reflection of the first seconds of the original film. The only marked difference is the colour grading and the quiet hum of Andy’s electric toothbrush, signalling the decades that have passed, given that Hathaway’s poreless face certainly tries to deny it. 

The original Devil Wears Prada was a film that took a major Hollywood gamble. Being an adaptation of the roman à clef of the same name, the production team were backed into a corner in terms of how to finance and market the film, given the sharp and overt satire of the woman who owned the entire fashion industry. Anna Wintour was still, by and large, the most powerful person in fashion when director David Frankel was fighting to create an accurate representation of the fashion industry in his film. Patricia Field, the costume designer, sourced approximately $1 million worth of clothing on a $100,000 budget through her personal connections outside of the so-called ‘Wintour ecosystem’. Intuitive filming locations like the Met, MoMA, and Bryant Park all had board members associated with Wintour and thus could not be used as sets. The film implicitly argues that this is a story worth telling, even if the industry it claims to be intimate with is intent on boycotting it. For an almost tiringly self-aware sequel – yes, we know that a million girls would kill for this job, and an early scene warps the Meryl Streep cinematic universe by featuring an Instagram post that uses a screencap of Miranda from the original film – The Devil Wears Prada 2 doesn’t seem to recall the conditions of production in 2006 at all. 

From its earliest scenes through to the very end, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is functionally an unskippable ad. The sponsorships that the film took are displayed in a very obvious and sometimes tacky manner  – though I could see it coming from a million miles away, the shameless Starbucks promo made me wince and sink into my seat a little further. Whilst the coffee cups can be ignored to some degree, the brand partnerships are unfortunately also integral to the plot. 

We find out early on that Emily (Emily Blunt) now works in the advertising department of Dior. Andy, Miranda, and Nigel (Stanley Tucci) must appease her after it is revealed that a puff piece published by Runway praises a brand that uses sweatshop labour. Emily leverages this against the Runway executives in order to secure a five-page layout for the new Dior flagship, which Andy is assigned to write. In her interview with Andy, Emily speaks glowingly of how designer brands have essentially made themselves inaccessible for the average, middle-class consumer. According to Emily, the shoes you wear, the bag you carry, they speak to who you are and what you care about. Andy scoffs at this because she knows what the audience knows, too: your Dior purse only tells the world that you have too much money and not a clue what to do with it. The frustrating part is that she is functionally not at liberty to say anything else. The iron-clad partnership with Dior means that Andy, a character who we know to value principles over fancy dress, must change her tune. Patricia Field securing a Chanel wardrobe for the cast out of thin air is essentially what Nigel does for Andy in the first film – an important part about her transformation is that she has not actually risen in status, she has just made good friends in high places. In the second film, her new position as features editor at Runway earns Andy enough money to buy a luxury flat in central Manhattan. Maybe scoffing shows the true extent of her desire to retaliate. 

Though a big budget was undoubtedly necessary to secure the returning cast who are now all firmly on the A-list, I can’t help but partially blame the – pardon my French – late-stage capitalist slop on my screen on the rise of streaming services. This story, like all other scripts of the 2020s, has died a sad death; its eulogy will simply be the tudum sound. This is apparent even in the beigeness of the opening scene and Hathaway’s blemish-free face. Netflix has operated under a tiered subscription system for the last decade, wherein you can pay the difference to unlock ‘Ultra HD’ streaming. You can also, of course, pay to stream without ads. The luxury brand scheme that Emily describes is the same financial model that has taken hold of the film industry, causing the decline of cinema attendance and poisoning blockbuster-scale productions. Those who truly want it, the ever-growing roster of streaming services tells us, will pay for it. The rest of us must suffer.

It’s not all bad, though. I am definitely not high and mighty enough to claim myself indifferent to nostalgia bait, especially when it objectively makes a pretty good attempt at regenerating the buzz of its predecessor. Upon rewatching the first film with my friends to refresh our memories, one of them exclaimed: “There’s just so many scenes to queen out to!” This is what the sequel gets right – the focus is still largely on girls and gays, their fun, campy outfits, and of course, a musical number performed by Lady Gaga. Despite its glowering flaws, the film still makes for two hours spent smiling and bopping your head along to the soundtrack. 

However, the funniest part about the whole film is how it postures as self-conscious in a comically “maybe the real Prada was the devils we met along the way” manner, and still manages to be completely dense in other aspects. The 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada was written by Lauren Weisberger after she spent a period working as Anna Wintour’s personal assistant. Andy is literally given the option to take a $350,000 book deal to write what would have probably been a “gooey” (as Emily accurately characterises her) depiction of the Prada-clad HR disaster that she works for, by Miranda herself, and she still turns it down. “This could hurt Miranda,” she whispers in a trembling voice when she refuses her publisher friend Talia’s (Rachel Bloom) offer for the book, to which Talia rightly responds, “Which is fine, because Miranda is atrocious!” To Andy, it’s more complicated than that, and maybe this is an acceptably humanist approach, but one thing is certain. In the world of The Devil Wears Prada 2, there is one thing that could have never existed: The Devil Wears Prada.