The world that produced ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ — and produced its critique of Miranda Priestly — has collapsed. The sequel knows it. Whether audiences are ready to root for her now is the more interesting question.
The cultural memory of The Devil Wears Prada is selective in a specific way. Audiences remember Andy as the hero and Miranda as the dragon. They remember the bag-on-the-desk moment, Andy walking off into a redemptive Parisian sunrise, the voiceover suggesting that ambition without values is a closed loop. They remember the moral, in other words, which was the part of the movie that was always the most thinly argued.
What the film actually contained — what made it durable enough to warrant a sequel twenty years later — was the cerulean monologue. Streep, in maybe 90 seconds of screen time, cut the legs out from under her own movie’s framing. The point of the speech was not that fashion is misunderstood. The point was that contempt for an industry is almost always a confession of unfamiliarity with it, that expertise in any domain is a form of labor deserving respect, and that the people upstream of any cultural product — the ones making the calls, holding the standards, taking the meetings nobody sees — are doing work that trickles down whether you acknowledge it or not. Miranda was framed as the antagonist. Miranda was also the only character in the film who had a coherent theory of what she did and why it mattered.
Twenty years later, Miranda’s theory is the one that aged.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 lands this week into a media landscape that has, almost without exception, conceded every argument the original film thought it was making against Miranda Priestly. Magazines are husks. Editor-tastemakers have lost to TikTok teenagers and brand-deal-driven influencers. The Conde Nast that loomed behind the original Prada as an unspoken antagonist now functions, in 2026, less like an empire and more like a heritage brand fighting to remain relevant in its own building. Anna Wintour herself has taken the title “global head of content” — a phrase that would have been unthinkable in the 2006 universe and is, on its own, a tidy summary of where the cultural ground has shifted.
The reviews of DWP2 — the perceptive ones, anyway — are converging on a recognition that this is the movie’s actual subject. Time‘s review makes the case most directly: Miranda is the most-changed character not because she’s softened but because she now represents something the culture barely remembers it had. Craft. Standards. The conviction that someone has to be the final word on what matters. The original Miranda was terrifying because she had the power to ruin a career with a glance. The 2026 Miranda is poignant because she’s wielding that same power on behalf of something that’s already mostly gone.
Variety notes that the film flirts openly with the word “enshittification” — the term-of-art for the slow corporate hollowing-out of cultural products into smaller, cheaper, less valuable facsimiles of themselves. That a Disney sequel based on a 20-year-old fashion movie is willing to invoke that idea is, depending on your read, either gutsy or accidentally self-implicating. Critics have lined up on both sides. The Variety pan and the Time rave are essentially looking at the same film and reaching opposite verdicts about whether the gesture is sincere or just nostalgia in better tailoring.
The film’s actual villains, per multiple reviews, have shifted offscreen. There is reportedly a billionaire-owner subplot whose principals are clearly modeled on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez — a tell that the writers understand exactly which fight they’re picking. The threat to Runway in 2026 isn’t an Andy figure refusing to assimilate. It’s a checkbook with no ideas in it. Andy returns to the magazine not because she sold out but because the alternative — the journalism she left to pursue at the end of the first film — collapsed underneath her too. There is nowhere else to go. That detail, more than anything else in the reviews, is the one that should land on anyone working in media right now.
What this reframes, in retrospect, is the moral architecture of the original. The 2006 film told its audience that Andy was right to walk away. The 2026 film is, gently and with significantly more empathy, asking whether any of the people who walked away from the Mirandas of the world were actually building anything better. Some of them were. Most of them weren’t. The industries they fled have been replaced by systems with even less interest in standards, expertise, or continuity, and the people who stayed and fought — even ungenerously, even cruelly — turn out to have been holding a line nobody else was willing to hold.
There is, of course, an unavoidable irony at the center of all of this. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, by its own logic, a piece of recycled IP — the precise kind of culturally backward-looking corporate product the film is positioning itself against. Whether that constitutes hypocrisy or unusually self-aware filmmaking depends on how seriously the movie takes its own argument. The harshest reviewers think it’s the former. The most generous suspect it’s the latter. Either way, the film is in a conversation with the culture that produced it in a way that very few legacy sequels even attempt.
Twenty years ago, audiences cheered when Andy threw her phone into the Place de la Concorde fountain and walked away from Miranda. They were, at the time, watching a film they took to be about the dignity of refusing a corrupt system.
In 2026, watching the same actors play the same characters in a hollowed-out version of the same industry, it is at least worth asking what — and whom — that refusal actually served.
