reviewed The Devil Wears Prada 2 and found a sprightly, amiable sequel that sends Andrea “Andy” Sachs back into the orbit of Miranda Priestly after two decades away. Anne Hathaway returns as Andy, Meryl Streep is back as Miranda, and Stanley Tucci again plays Nigel in a film that revisits familiar beats while dropping its characters into a far harsher fashion business.
Andy comes back after being laid off by a Jeff Bezos-type boss from an upmarket broadsheet, then is offered the job of features editor at Runway. That old magazine now has none of the colossal budgets it once enjoyed, and it is grinding through a digital era ruled by clicks, eyeballs and a teen customer base that shapes everything it does.
The review’s weight is in how much the sequel leans on the old chemistry while making room for the new rules of the trade. Miranda has to pay lip-service to body positivity and to rejecting heteronormativity in the workplace, and she even gets corrected on language by her new assistant, Amari. She also has to fly coach, a small humiliation that says as much about the state of Runway as any speech could.
The film also gives Andy a romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate played by Patrick Brammall, while Miranda’s boyfriend, played by Kenneth Branagh, is a string quartet violinist. Emily Blunt returns as Emily, now the head of Dior, and she delivers the film’s clearest line of business logic, saying ultra-luxury brands for the 0.1% are recession-proof. Justin Theroux plays Emily’s boyfriend Benji, and the movie also folds in star-fan cameos.
That social and commercial shift is the point of the sequel. The fashion and magazine industries have changed substantially since the mid-00s original, and Runway is no longer the money-soaked temple it once was. It is a place of smaller budgets, more pressure, and more careful language, which is why the return of screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel matters: they are not just reuniting the cast, they are measuring what survived the years and what did not.
The film also keeps looking over its shoulder at the first movie. Andy talks with Nigel in the cafeteria again, and she goes to Milan again, both moments turning nostalgia into a test of whether the old moves still work in a newer, meaner industry. The review called Anna Wintour the white whale of cameos, which captures the sequel’s larger game: it is less interested in pretending the world has not changed than in showing how hard everyone in it has had to change with it. Yes, the answer is that the sequel works because it knows the old fantasy has aged, and it makes that aging part of the story.