The Devil Wears Prada 2 reflects the decline of fashion magazines

Since its release in 2006, The Devil Wears Prada has become a pop cultural phenomenon. Based on a roman a clef by Lauren Weisberger, one-time assistant to Anna Wintour, it tells the story of Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who lands a job at the fashion magazine Runway, as an assistant to imperious editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). It cemented both Wintour’s celebrity status and the image of glossy magazines as cut-throat bastions of taste and glamour. It gave us that speech about how Andy’s seemingly accidental cerulean blue sweater “represents millions of dollars and countless jobs . . . ”

Twenty years on, the real magazine world looks a little different. Like Venice, it’s gilded but sinking. Among other signs of decline since its heyday, Conde Nast just announced the closure of Self magazine, and US Vogue has been cut to eight print issues a year. For many, social media has eclipsed legacy fashion publications in terms of relevance, and once lavish budgets for photo shoots and expenses are down.

It is in this tougher landscape that The Devil Wears Prada 2 is set. Priestly, still editor of Runway, still as chilly as the glass on a properly served martini, is hit by scandal after working with a fast-fashion brand using exploitative working practices. Runway’s parent company’s solution is to hire Sachs — now an award-winning “proper” journalist — as features editor, tasking her with crisis management and adding credibility. Sachs has just been laid off from her job at a newspaper and traditional media is in a bad place.

The film has had an obligatory glitzy global press tour clamouring for our attention via Schiaparelli and Valentino ball gowns with the persistence of a toddler yelling “mum, mum, watch me!” There is merch. Think popcorn buckets in the shape of handbags. Yet it’s a further sign of the times that at points The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels like an elegy for an industry, albeit with sequins and jokes.

The film’s costume designer Molly Rogers, who worked on the original film with Patricia Field, as well as Sex and the City, agrees that there’s this sense of threat.

Talking in a suite at the Corinthia Hotel in London, where the filmmakers have taken over much of the first floor, she says, “The message of the film is: we are all under siege, our jobs, our way of life, our privacy . . . I don’t want a shopper to go out and have AI assist them with their creative eye. I don’t want them to shop by algorithm. I want their own experience to influence what blue belt they bring back. The human touch.”

Now the villains are management consultants and tech bros. So embattled are creativity and journalism that Priestly’s pragmatism towards advertisers and financiers is now seen as a necessary survival instinct.

Perhaps the strongest defence of real fashion as imagined by editorial visionaries is to show its inherent power. And that’s what Rogers has aimed to do with the wardrobes, in particular with that of Miranda Priestly.

“For me it’s so basic. Does that look good on you?” she says of her guiding principle. “Do I believe that 20 years later Miranda Priestly has amassed power? Does that shoulder say that you have a great deal of confidence? I watched the first movie and saw pencil skirts, it was a uniform like Karl Lagerfeld used to wear, but now I think she’s much more relaxed. Her skirts move. Her wonderful jackets have this incredible sharp lapel and a cuff that she could roll up, like ‘who do you think you’re talking to?’ The silhouette is ‘cleaner’ than it was 20 years ago but not more casual.” No hybrid-working sneakers here.

Many editors now opt for an androgynous uniform in neutral shades: lots of blazers and wide jeans, but as in the first film the costumes dial up real life. The main characters do favour tailoring, such as Priestly’s grey jacket and skirt from Sasuphi, but Andy also wears a multicoloured Gabriela Hearst maxidress, and a backless jumpsuit with studded collar and cuffs, and leather tie. Anyone who took issue with the baker boy cap in the first film as an example of gratuitous accessorising may need a trigger warning for the tie situation.

Thus, Rogers didn’t visit magazine offices or look to Anna Wintour for inspiration. “In the first movie, Meryl and Pat [Patricia Field] were like ‘it’s not a documentary — we’ve got to create this being.’” Instead they looked at pictures of editor Polly Mellon and model Carmen Dell’Orefice wearing grey and silver, while “white hair was so important”.

One standout outfit from the new film is a jacket from the Dries Van Noten autumn/winter 2025 show covered in little curtain tassels, with the decorative chutzpah of a matador. Rogers says, “It’s an editrix jacket, it’s the sister jacket to the one in the first movie with gold coins on it. I fought long and hard to get that in the movie . . . In our [fashion] world a tassel jacket is kind of mild, but there are people who want it camera-tested. Miranda wears it to walk into a scene full of pinstripe suits . . . the enemy!”

When it comes to Andy, she has parlayed her brief first stint at Runway into forging a breezily stylish wardrobe of slouchy blazers and white jeans, pleated skirts and shirts. She’s got canny with her shopping and makes a point of saying she has thrifted a Margiela jacket. As she ups her fashion game, it all goes a bit more Sex and the City in its theatricality, via the aforementioned ties and a chainmail Rabanne dress chosen by Anne Hathaway herself. Overall, the costumes strike a good balance between realism and an amped-up, campy glamour many viewers expect from the genre. Let’s call it a fash-com.

Rogers aimed for a timeless look rather than an exact snapshot of 2026, but adds that over 20 years “the most revolutionary comparison . . . was how you procure things and product placement. Brands just wanted to be involved in this project. In the first film Pat and I were up on a ladder in New Jersey ourselves — no assistants — looking at Donna Karan archives. If I tell a kid that works in my office, go to some warehouse and get on a ladder, they’d be, ‘Why? I’ve got the digital look book here.’”

The film has partnered with Dior, Mercedes, Tiffany and L’Oreal among others, and Vogue is understandably milking its association, putting Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep on its cover together, and dedicating a recent Vogue Book Club to the original novel. The fashion industry is a bigger juggernaut than ever, but who holds the power is changing.

Some things don’t change, though. In the new film, one Runway editor asks of a corporate type intent on cost-cutting: “Does he even like fashion, he wears Drakkar Noir,” dismissing him as “dressing head to toe in performance synthetics”. Magazines may have passed their heyday, but the spicy put-downs endure.

Carola Long © 2026 The Financial Times.

This article was originally published in The Financial Times.