As a tween, I’d often fantasized that I’d grow into The Devil Wears Prada’s Andy Sachs. I dreamed of working at a glossy fashion magazine, surrounded by glamorous well-dressed colleagues and a friend group of equally glamorous creative types. If I worked hard enough and got good enough grades—just like Andy!—it felt reasonable—no, inevitable—that I’d spend by twenties like her: an ambitious go-getter in media, ready to take on the world. Adrian Grenier would be my boyfriend, and a sexy, famous essayist would pursue me because I wrote really good stories for my college newspaper.

Twenty years and several shattered economies later, I’ve found myself uncomfortable close, instead, to the heroine of the Devil Wears Prada 2: a media worker at a small but respected New York–based outlet, living in an outer-borough apartment that regularly fails to generate hot water. I even accidentally dressed like Andy on my way to see the movie at midtown’s finest AMC Kips Bay 15: plaid trousers, a starched shirt, and a striped blazer, thrifted of course. (“It’s Margiela. Eleven bucks,” Andy brags about her own jacket to Stanley Tucci’s Nigel in an early scene. Been there!)

In the opening scene, the “brilliant” Andy (Anne Hathaway) is laid off via text message while receiving an award for her reporting. I’d make a “that happened to my buddy” joke, but it literally did. I wish my friend had had Andy’s good luck: within hours, she’s magically swooped out of her unemployment to run the features department of Vogue stand-in Runway, a job her journalist friends inexplicably chastise her for taking. (Instead, they advise, she should do what laid-off media workers everywhere have done, and sell a nonfiction book proposal for a middling advance.) Runway, meanwhile, is reeling from its own institutional scandal: the magazine is being ripped apart online for publishing a glowing article about the SHEIN-like “Speed Fash,” and it’s put the publication’s whole reputation at risk. Dior is pulling its advertising! Without advertising, there’s no magazine. And so our crisis begins.

At some point in Andy’s twenty-year trajectory from basically abused personal assistant to optics-saving senior editor, she’s grown into a sense of style. Gone are the schlubby post-college outfits that earned her so much ire in the first film, the ill-fitting sweaters and shapeless beige skirts. Andy’s a serious journalist now, and a serious journalist draws her inspiration from classic menswear! In her first day back at Runway, Andy arrives in a just-oversized suit: a navy pinstripe blazer over wide legged black pants, a look nearly identical to the one she wore to the press awards–turned–media bloodbath. The outfit is understated, chic, and decent enough to go without withering comment from notoriously cruel Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), though perhaps that’s more a result of the Editor in Chief’s HR-sponsored declawing in the sequel, narrated through a series of plodding “un-PC” asides throughout the film. Andy’s face hasn’t aged, but at least her sartorial sense has.

But a good thing, like a career in journalism or a face, can’t last forever. As soon as Andy has her first big win at Runway—securing an interview with an elusive (lady!) billionaire—her outfits begin to suffer. Where did she acquire a leather tie, and why is she wearing it over a jumpsuit with a rock-studded collar, cuffs, and hems? If costume designer Molly Rogers was trying to showcase Andy’s badassery by dressing her like a pop-punk businesswoman, she’s only served to make our heroine look like Emily in Paris. More wardrobe dysfunction follows: when Andy fawns over a dress in the Runway closet and begs Nigel to let her borrow it for a weekend in the Hamptons, we expect it to be as “beautiful” as she coos; instead, the shapeless Mondrian-style sack dress she chooses and pairs with a straw bucket hat could be a thrift store curtain. (In reality, it’s a nearly $8,000 number by Gabriela Hearst.) It’s almost as bad as the ASOS–ass $7,000 blue sequin Rabanne dress Andy dons for her publisher’s 75th birthday—a dress her colleagues repeatedly compliment, maybe to distract from the fact that the piece looks straight out of Speed Fash.

Still, Andy’s outfits have nothing on her business frenemy, Emily (Emily Blunt). Our head of . . . something? . . . at Dior wears nothing but the too-tight, too-stiff, too-loud designer clothing of a rich person desperate to prove their worth. Did Dior approve this? Emily’s edgy corsets and logo-plastered, bosom-baring blouses strive for dominatrix but land somewhere closer to Spirit Halloween Adult Madame Mob Dress Costume. When halfway through the film the two women join forces, all remaining traces of Andy’s once-covetable wardrobe go out the window, taking the plot with them. Slinking out of her hotel room in the early morning, Andy puts on the worst fit of anyone in the whole two hours: a leather pageboy hat, plaid tie-as-necklace, sparkle jumpsuit, and a maroon pleather trench, all of which manages to still look like pajamas. Beside her, Emily’s leg-of-mutton trousers and John Galliano–branded hoodie aren’t even that bad—a slouched and louche look that references, abstractly, a kind of royal-off-duty: fitting for her attempted ascension to Runway’s throne.

I’d hoped the Devil Wears Prada 2 would be a masterclass in costuming—that the franchise, beloved for treating fashion as a serious pursuit, would use the characters’ clothes to support and complicate the narrative of the script. There is thankfully some of that. Newly at war with a young publisher and a suite of McKinsey consultants, Miranda Priestly wears a tasseled, shoulder-padded jacket that suggests both military wear and frivolity, a pretty perfect encapsulation of her character’s positioning in the back half of the film. And I fell in love with the brief shot of Andy’s vintage International Ladies Garment Workers Union T-shirt, which she wears in a single shot working at home, and which offers a quick and rewarding glimpse at both our heroine’s labor politics and her deeper-than-passing interest in the fashion industry. The best-dressed person in the movie might be Andy’s barely acknowledged old-school news-reporter friend, “Mack,” played by Larry Mitchell. We see him only in a shredded Yankees cap and gray button-up shirt, but both pieces are so perfectly worn-in they suggest a depth of character withheld from anybody else in the film.

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How should a sequel’s costumes be? The costumes in the original Devil Wears Prada were designed by the legendary Patricia Field. Field is best known for her work on Sex and the City—a television show with costumes so good, countless Instagram accounts still post the character’s outfits as fashion inspiration today. When Sex and the City was rebooted in 2021 as And Just Like That . . ., fans were aghast about two egregious absences: brash Samantha had been excised from the friend group, and—even more devastating—Pat Field, then 80 years old, wouldn’t be returning to the production. Instead, costumes on the reboot would be handled by Field’s former assistant: Molly Rogers. The younger designer’s work, alas, failed to match her mentor’s: like the script and direction, the costumes in And Just Like That are bastardized versions of the originals, with the unimpeachably well-dressed women from the original series swapped out for kooky, misguided dressers overwhelmed by their wardrobes. The costuming in the Devil Wears Prada reboot, too, might send the viewer back to rummage through the vintage pleasures of the original. Field’s costumes in the 2006 film were inseparable form the story. There is no movie without Andy’s iconic cerulean sweater, her thigh-high Chanel boots; Miranda is inconceivable without her gigantic red fur coat or her face-framing purple boatneck blouse. Even the most outlandish garments possess a utilitarian elegance: our protagonists may work at a fashion magazine, but they’re still there to work, and their clothing reflects that. The costumes are often breathtaking—I’m astonished on every rewatch at Andy’s black New Look–inspired finale dress—but they play a supporting role. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the costumes, instead, are scene-stealers, and not in a good way.

Rogers would always have to fight an uphill battle with the costumes for a 2026 reboot. Our actors, once fresh-faced and expressive, have become stilted and botoxed, frozen into distorted approximations of their 23-year-old selves. Every part of The Devil Wears Prada 2 would work better if our protagonists looked like actual midcareer professionals and not plasticky editorial assistants. How much more we might feel for Miranda Priestly, facing a declining reputation and the tail end of her professional prime, if she looked genuinely old! How much more devastating to see Nigel trapped in the same right-hand-man role at Runway, if he wasn’t also living in the same body. Instead, you can barely tell that twenty years have passed, except insofar as the clothing looks out of place and out of time.

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Fashion writ large in The Devil Wears Prada 2 is treated like a joke. We see Marc Jacobs in celebrity cameo working on a (real-life) 2026 runway look, bulbous and gaudy, positioned in contrast to tiny Miranda Priestly for a cheap laugh. The one piece of fashion content we see direct from the Runway team—a grayed-out digital shoot of tattered clothing against a depressing industrial background—parodies the worst output from Vogue without real commentary. Most egregiously, there’s the flop, Vogue World–inspired Milan runway show that the movie spends two hours building up. The peak of fashion excellence is, apparently, a visionless parade of models on a poorly lit octagonal runway, set to a live performance of Lady Gaga’s new movie original, “Shape of a Woman.” One model walks around in Frida Kahlo cosplay, floral crown included; another struts in a Project Runway Junior attempt at J. Lo’s famous Versace green dress. Another model carries a literal parasol. There is no statement here, sartorial or otherwise, beyond “lots of different clothes exist <3.”

It’s a shame that this fashion shit show distracts from the film’s much more realistic and distressing account of a truly enshittified industry, print media. I was surprised, and somewhat horrified, to see the mechanics of the magazine industry’s economy explained so plainly on screen. Emily Blunt is wrong about those ghastly Jean Paul Gaultier overalls, but she’s right that magazines like Vogue live and die at the mercy of their advertisers. The ominous signs of decline at Elias-Clarke (no more private cars, executives eating in the cafeteria) are identical to ones that marked the real decline of Condé Nast, according to Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite. Andy’s laid-off comrades, too, offer an uncomfortably close-to-home portrait, not even all that satirical, of erstwhile investigative reporters who now spend their workdays editing celebrity dog memoirs. In a way, the movie winds up almost resembling the magazine industry. Both the film and business it satirizes are a shadow of what they once were, propped up by product placement and diminishing advertising dollars, full of too-skinny celebrities who can’t raise their eyebrows anymore. The stories are thinner, the costs are higher, and neither Vogue nor our sequel are participating in, let alone steering, the most interesting conversations in fashion right now.

This might just be the most cynical—and thus true-to-life—entry in the Woman With a Magazine Job canon. The film joins the hallowed ranks of 13 Going on 30, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Sex and the City, among many others, the films and TV shows that made working in (fashion) media look like the most glamorous job in the world. In the early 21st-century rom-com universe, the magazine job was a shorthand for a woman both smart and sexy—and the sheer number of Magazine Woman protagonists implied a thriving industry with an abundance of excellent, stable work. (Book publishing has its rom-com heroines, too—never forget The Proposal (2009), with Sandra Bullock as a tough-but-secretly-romantic editor whose authors include Don DeLillo.)

As if proposing a corrective to that canon, here’s The Devil Wears Prada 2, opening with the harshest and most serious of realities: a career as a Media Woman in 2026 is very likely to end, unceremoniously, in a layoff, a buyout, a whole property sold to an impulsive magnate and shuttered altogether. Watching it after a day at my own, never-not-financially-precarious media workplace, I couldn’t help but wonder: can the magazine job still be the stuff of romantic comedies? In its stylistic choices, The Devil Wears Prada 2 certainly treats it as such. The opening shots of the movie recall the feminist workplace romps of the 1980s (Baby Boom, 9 to 5, Working Girl) all of which, open on romantic shots of the city with crowds of woman professionals heading to their woman-professional jobs (some, presumably, in media). I laughed out loud at the quick-zoom camerawork throughout the movie, which made the film feel like a zany screwball. The Runway offices are well-lit and full of racially diverse, stylish people; when Andy gets an upgrade to her personal office in the movie’s final shot, it’s just as big and nice as the Editor in Chief’s. See: there is a future in magazines, and a future for magazines, too—as long as they fall under the reign of a benevolent (female) billionaire. “I love working,” Miranda confides with a giggle to Andy. “Don’t you?” The Devil Wears Prada 2 sets itself up as a movie about the instability of a contemporary media career, but ends up taking us to a fantasy world in which, when a journalist gets laid off, she immediately gets a better and higher-paying new job; a fantasy world in which the public gets irate about a legacy magazine defending fast fashion, instead of the reality we have, where our luxury magazines constantly shill for pieces from Aritzia and Zara, increasingly reliant on affiliate income from polyester slacks.  The tween me, who dreamed of a job at Runway, still finds something to like about that world, and about a movie that can’t quite fully commit to pure critique. Why should it? We’re already living in bleak times for media—we might as well gawk at some absurd and dazzling outfits while we’re in it.

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