Twenty years after the original film, The Devil Wears Prada is back with the old team, the old characters and, as one review puts it, much of the old plot too. ’s review of The Devil Wears Prada 2 called it “a sequel? For spring? Groundbreaking,” while saying that “Satan’s clothing and accessory choices are pretty much what they were.”
Anne Hathaway returns as Andrea “Andy” Sachs, who comes back after being laid off by a Jeff Bezos-type boss at an upmarket broadsheet, even though she had been winning awards for serious but dull articles. This time she lands as features editor for Runway, a magazine operating on much smaller budgets than it once did, and the story again sends her into the orbit of Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, Stanley Tucci’s Nigel and a fashion world that still treats panic as a working method.
That matters because the sequel is not just revisiting old characters; it is revisiting the old machinery of status, vanity and survival that made the original so durable. The publishing and fashion worlds have changed over the last twenty years. Runway now lives in a digital landscape driven by clicks and a teen customer base, but the film keeps coming back to the same kind of backstage scramble, even as its characters are forced to operate in a smaller, meaner economy.
Miranda is not the only one adapting badly. In the sequel she has to fly coach and takes language lessons from her new assistant, Amari, played by Simone Ashley, while Andy has a romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate played by Patrick Brammall. Emily Blunt is back as Emily, now the head of Dior, and Justin Theroux plays her boyfriend Benji. Kenneth Branagh also appears as Miranda’s latest boyfriend, a violinist in a string quartet.
The film leans hard on reunion energy, with Aline Brosh McKenna and David Frankel returning to the project and a string of star-fan cameos threaded through the story. There is a cafeteria scene with Andy and Nigel, a moment where Nigel picks out something for Andy to wear on a trip to Miranda’s place in the Hamptons, a trip to Milan and a run of backstairs shenanigans aimed at protecting Miranda from a corporate coup. The result is a sequel that knows exactly what made the first film work, then mostly gives it back in familiar packaging.
Miranda Priestly, modeled on Vogue editor Anna Wintour, remains the center of gravity, and the sequel seems to understand that her power was never just in the clothes. It was in the economy of fear around her. Two decades later, that dynamic has been updated for a smaller-budget, faster, clickier world, but not reinvented. The film’s answer to its own big question is plain enough: yes, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a reunion, and yes, it is also a rerun.
