Synopsis
Twenty years on, Miranda Priestly still occupies a top position in a publishing empire that by now exists more out of inertia than necessity. Runway is no longer a magazine: it is an organism in a state of survival, suspended between print and digital, between legacy and obsolescence, between prestige and irrelevance. The world that had made her central — the world of journalism and cultural mediation — has progressively dissolved, giving way to a continuous, diffuse, centerless information system.
Andy returns, no longer as a figure in the making but as a fully integrated professional, the bearer of that maturity the film insists on calling "awareness," and which instead looks like a refined form of adaptation. Emily, Nigel, and a new generation of assistants inhabit this unstable space: no longer apprentices of a craft, but operators of a flow.
Review
5 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 29. April 2026
Fashion is the eternal recurrence of the new. — W. Benjamin
Between New York and Milan — both reduced to perfectly lit surfaces — the film builds a world in which everything is still formally in its place: offices, runway shows, events, meetings. But nothing seems to have any real foundation anymore.
Work is not narrated as experience. It is shown as an inevitable condition.
There is a kind of involuntary irony — and therefore a perfect one — in The Devil Wears Prada 2: a film that would like to update its own universe and instead ends up exposing it, almost didactically, in its terminal phase.
It is not simply a problem of pacing. It is an ontological problem. The film does not slow down: it empties out.
The narrative no longer builds progression because the world it stages no longer allows for development, only management. Everything has already happened, everything is already available, everything is already in circulation. The scenes do not evolve: they are arranged. Like commodities.
And this, in fact, is exactly what the film — without really meaning to — manages to show with an almost cruel precision: the complete commodification of the experience of work.
The focus insists on "change" — the crisis of print, the need to reinvent oneself, the evolution of professional dynamics — as if we were facing a transitional phase. But what we see is not a transition. It is a stabilization of emptiness.
Work is not changing. It has already changed. And the film arrives afterward.
The characters are no longer subjects acting within the system: they are functions that keep it alive. Journalism, invoked as an ethical horizon in the first film, is here completely absorbed into the logic of business. There is no longer any pretense of autonomy. Information does not interpret: it feeds.
Andy, who ought to embody a form of critical consciousness ripened over time, appears instead as the perfectly successful figure of neoliberal adaptation: flexible, competent, mobile, and above all incapable of pulling away. Her "choice" is not a choice. It is a compatibility — at times rhetorical, at times pathetic…
A brief mention of Pluribus seems warranted, although here what occurs in a mainstream register is rendered in that series with both formal and thematic sophistication.
A brief mention of Pluribus seems warranted, although here what occurs in a mainstream register is rendered in that series with both formal and thematic sophistication.
Miranda Priestly, for her part, is perhaps the most tragic character — though the film is careful not to say so. She is called upon to manage the survival of a publishing system that no longer has any reason to exist, but which must keep producing symbolic value in order to justify its own existence. She is no longer a figure of power: she is a keeper of ruins, and she has entirely lost the cutting, ruthless, rigorous edge that once defined her.
And yet, she keeps functioning. Because the system does not need meaning. It needs continuity.
The film insists obsessively on aesthetics — costumes, archives, labels — as though fashion could still be a space of cultural production. In reality, what we see is a pure circulation of signs. Clothes do not signify: they certify. They do not express identity: they replace it.
The diffuse presence of brands like Chanel, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, and Armani does not build an imaginary: it builds an inventory, alongside cameos from Donatella Versace and Lady Gaga. A perfectly organized catalogue of what is left when fashion stops being a language and becomes an asset.
Milan, from this point of view, is the film's most interesting theoretical device. It is not a city. It is a replica.
The Last Supper reconstructed in a studio, runway shows assembled in a few days, villas converted into temporary locations: everything contributes to a single, precise sensation — reality has become a technical obstacle, to be sidestepped with a good set design.
It is the definitive triumph of simulation. And work, inside this simulation, loses every residue of concreteness.
The Runway offices — eight times larger than they used to be — do not amplify productivity, but visibility. Enormous spaces for bodies that must be constantly available, constantly reachable, constantly performing. One does not work: one is present.
The new generation of assistants, whom the film tries to portray as more autonomous, more assertive, more "aware," introduces only a minimal variation: they are no longer afraid. But not because they are free. Because they have internalized the system.
They do not endure work. They embody it.
And so the point is no longer whether the film works as a story. The point is that The Devil Wears Prada 2 works far too well as a symptom.
It is a film that desperately tries to be entertainment — bright, nostalgic, "joyous," as its own creators declare with a certain innocence — but ends up showing at least something far less reassuring: a world of work fully absorbed into economic logic, the inertia in the face of one's own replaceability, the stripping away of any critical distance.
There is no more conflict because there is no more boss. There is no more opposition because there is no more alternative.
And the rhythm — that diffuse slowness, that struggle to build tension — stops being a flaw. It becomes a form of truth.
Because to narrate contemporary capitalism would require an impossible narrative: a narrative capable of stopping a flow that never stops.
The film does not manage it. But in its failure, something emerges.
A perfect surface, glossy, impeccable. Beneath which one glimpses, with ever less effort, not the dream of success — but the normalization of subordination.
Fashion does not develop, it replaces. — R. Barthes
