The Devil Wears Prada 2 reminds us that leading with principled ambition is no vice
The Devil Wears Prada 2 reads as a vapid, fan-service outing to pick up where the original story left off: a perpetually up-and-coming New York journalist trades in her byline and deigns to immerse herself in the artifice of fashion, and ultimately learns many valuable lessons along the way.
But this sequel felt different and it felt pressing, even with the world on fire. Especially because the world is on fire. Part of my cringe factor is that sometimes—sometimes, but not all the time—I like vapid and pretty things.
It’s why I like design so much because it always looks flawless when it’s done right. But the reality is that design, art, music, aesthetics of most sorts, aren’t just vapid or pretty. When they’re done right, they look effortless, belying the hours, days, weeks, years, and innumerable iterations that went into creating them.
Without giving too much away, the first movie was based on a roman-a-clef novel of the same name in a time when tell-all, fish-out-of-water memoirs were a big business. Remembrances-to-movies like “Girl, Interrupted,” “Naked,” “Running With Scissors,” “Eat, Pray, Love,” “The Nanny Diaries,” and “Jarhead,” were among some of the biggest launchpads for the storytelling of entire generations.
In the first movie, the lessons were:
- to not to judge books by their cover
- that everyone who creates something works hard
- and those at the top are good at covering their asses.
What’s different about this time is generational. The young college grad/would-be Susanne Craig is now a seasoned, award-winning journalist. Her friends and colleagues have families and spacious homes in Gotham and live charmed lives with good lighting and well-designed workplaces. Miranda Priestly is now a complete institution at Runway and Nigel Kipling (modeled on the late André Leon Talley) is still at her side. While some chess pieces have stayed on the board, they are in different squares and have well-earned patina.
Another undercurrent is the rise of tech billionaires and the continued, reduced stature of print media. As a former managing editor, I couldn’t help but feel that dynamic in my bones.
At one point, the stand-in for Bezos is having a conversation about the future uselessness of tracheas. I looked over at my comrade who is most likely to say such things after listening to a new podcast or nonfiction book but received no knowing glare. What is present is just how little these new millennium robber barons think of the work that the humans beneath them (yes, even the great Miranda Priestly is forced to sing for her supper in this outing).
Through it all, Anne Hathaway’s plucky, millennial Andy Sachs may have gotten a promotion, but she’s still intimidated by the giants moving around her in her elevated position. That is, until she throws herself fully into the game once again. What’s shifted in this version is how Miranda Priestly, the Boomer head of state for the nation of fashion, is willing to be vulnerable in her later years and how much she trusts an employee she’s always kept at arm’s length out of necessity.
As my besties and I dissected our favorite parts of the movie (Gaga makes a hilarious and flawless cameo of course, and Caleb Hearon steals every scene he’s in) I found myself putting on the Chanel boots of my counterpart from a parallel world. As a millennial who’s been through a defining national tragedy, a war on terror, the ensuing quagmire, working to elect the first Black president, being disappointed by his second term, three recessions, two international genocides, a global pandemic, an international uprising for justice, an emboldened fascist in power, and a federal occupation of the city they call home … exhaustion doesn’t do justice to the sense of fatalism that one can experience after surviving the first quarter century of this “new” millennium.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, however. Andy Sachs reminds us of how effective a good heart, care, organizing, and principled ambition can be for moving mountains.
The qualifications I’m attaching to this gush is that, like many roman-a-clefs/memoirs-to-movies of the genre, it’s almost entirely not fat, cisgender white people living into the main character storyline. And yes, these characters (and their real life counterparts, lest we forget) live, work, and play in spaces and with other people that you nor I could afford on any consistent or meaningful basis. They all work overtime to preserve a for-profit institution that sets unrealistic standards. And while that’s all taken as read for the audience, they are creating things that endure.
Nothing is perfect. I’m a Catholic and I know that to my core. I’m a piece of shit and you are too. Now that those formalities are out of the way, it’s time to dream and for those of us who love to work to get back to work, it’s been our turn for awhile now.
While I will always remind people that it’s intolerable to me that Indigenous people have to qualify and pay for housing and the right to move across our own lands, that Black folk have to pay for anything in a society their ancestors’ labor created, and that queer people have always existed and will continue to exist despite the patriarchy’s best efforts, for just under two hours, there exists a world where principled ambition and beauty is the result of caring work, not as a showpiece for greedy billionaires.
For practitioners of the Enneagram I am fond of saying that I came of age in the Age of Fours. In the early 2000s, while the mainstream was watching the first installment of “The Devil Wears Prada,” I was crying over the beauty of a Sufjan Stevens album, getting lost in the worlds created and statements made by Michael Ray Charles, Andrea Zittel, and Barry McGee, and of course, loving anything done by Bjork. All of these millennial sensibilities were absolutely formed by creators of means who had the resources to chase their dreams, but not all of them knew they would amount to much or that what they had to say was that important, but they had care, organizing, and principled ambition.
For the last six years, I’ve existed in a self-imposed holding pen, for what purpose, I had no clue. I entered 2020 as an unemployed former journalist-turned-communications professional and when the pandemic came, I started back up again in retail to pay the bills. Then I worked for people and volunteered for places whose strategy was so precise that I learned how not to say things. And when I was ready to strike out on my own again with a whole list of projects I’d collected while I was busy not saying things, I was picked up again by beloved comrades who wanted me to use my storytelling strategically and precisely, once again. And I find myself not saying things, again.
It started me believing that I had nothing to say.
While it’s a vapid-looking piece of fan-service, what I was reminded of was that no one is ever going to give us permission to do the thing we desperately want to do. We just have to do it. As Millennials wrestling down the dying dragon of white supremacy and patriarchy, it feels like survival instinct to just clamp down and not move, especially when the dragon shoots our peers dead in the street.
Like Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
This is a time for vision.
This is a time for principles.
This is a time for ambition.
This is a time to hold onto what’s important while doing what’s necessary.
Hoyekiyapi 
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