At a moment of cultural transition, as the internet began seeping into modern life, "The Devil Wears Prada" was released just one year before the iPhone. Looking back, it feels almost mythic: a glossy snapshot of the last gasp before fashion, media and culture were flattened by algorithms and redirected ad dollars. Despite arriving in the shadow of a world still recovering from post-9/11 anxiety and inching toward economic collapse, the era retained a kind of aspirational charm rooted in the unreachable glamour of print magazines and the fantasy of New York City.
Maybe that’s why the film has endured. All of us in fashion and adjacent worlds know David Frankel’s 2006 film all too well — the cutting one-liners, the cerulean monologue and its distinctly noughties sense of glamour defined by a world still lived fully in the moment. It captured an industry on the cusp of immense change, when print journalism still held cultural authority. Now, the internet has completely transformed that world, and it’s on this stage where the sequel enters the fray. It has already generated millions in buzz alongside surpassing the original film’s box office total — garnering over $433 million globally within its first 10 days, including roughly $76.7 million domestically on opening weekend according to box office stats.
The sequel sees Andy Sachs drawn back into the orbit of Miranda Priestly years after leaving Runway, as the magazine attempts to survive a collapsing print ecosystem and a fast-fashion scandal triggered by the publication of a feature on a Shein-like conglomerate that Miranda had overlooked.
Photo: Getty Images
At the same time, Andy and her team at a more “serious” publication are abruptly laid off — an early sequence that immediately situates the story within the precarity of today’s media industry. From there, Andy’s return to Miranda’s world unsettles old power dynamics as she is pulled back into efforts to stabilize and save the institution she once escaped.
Running alongside this is a billionaire storyline, as tech-backed patrons enter the orbit of fashion media, endeavoring to reframe editorial influence with private capital as the main driver. Ring any bells?
It’s in this framework that the film both nods to and arrives within an even more tumultuous moment for journalism, media and the fashion industry at large, as it faces shrinking budgets and strain across all sectors — where instability is no longer confined to the newsroom, but felt across the entire production and consumption chain of fashion. This raises the question of whether this is, in fact, the right moment for the film’s release.
For fashion writer and consultant (and former The Zoe Report editor) Aemilia Madden, it is. The film’s relevance extends beyond an industry still navigating an identity crisis, and speaks just as clearly to the structural gaps within the film industry itself, which is facing a parallel set of pressures and recalibrations. “To have a movie that passes the Bechdel test, that’s aimed directly at women, and doesn’t center relationships is what we need more of; and what studios don’t always take risks on today,” she says.
Amy Odell, a veteran fashion journalist, author of the bestselling “Anna: The Biography,” as well as the voice behind the Back Row podcast and newsletter, also underscores the film’s value as a cultural document — one that captures not only surface-level shifts within the industry, but the slower structural erosion beneath them. It is, she suggests, a deliberately sobering reflection of a sobering era.
“I think the commentary on the media industry is really on point,” she notes. “The first film presented a fantasy of the world, and this one presents more of the grim reality…Condé Nast has been cut down to size — it’s almost like a clipping company now.”
Photo: Macall Polay/2026 20th Century Studios
That grim reality is hardly an exaggeration. In just the last six years, major media companies including Condé Nast, Vice Media and Vox Media have collectively undergone thousands of layoffs, with Glamour among the most affected in Condé's latest rounds, which eliminated much of the title's editorial and support staff.
While the fashion world has transformed in many ways over the past two decades, Odell, who has reported extensively on its internal structures, is direct about what has not changed: “There are still a lot of toxic assistant jobs,” she says. “A lot of people still aren’t getting paid.” Even as the industry has become paradoxically more corporate and ostensibly more democratized, its internal hierarchies remain largely intact.
For Madden, who now authors the newsletter Taeste Bud, there is a lot to reconcile in navigating an industry that is on increasingly fragile footing. “Right now, things can feel quite bleak — AI is replacing our jobs, expenses are rising, politics are toxic,” she says. Perhaps that’s why we keep returning to these stories, especially when it juggles our harrowing reality with a healthy dose of satirized whimsy. “I think there’s something comforting about looking back and viewing the past as simpler times, even if that’s not how it felt living it.”
Nostalgia is a driver of many sequels, but "The Devil Wears Prada 2" feels especially resonant given how the first film captured the golden age of magazines. Social media strategist and fashion creator Jay Choyce-Tibbitts zooms out to the system that reshaped everything around it — the internet. “Before that transformative period, culture was filtered through a relatively small number of gatekeepers. Condé Nast and Vogue were really the documenters, filters and distributors of culture," he says. "But today basically every single person is their own publisher.”
Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for 20th Century Studios
In that shift, legacy media has been forced into competition with the very audiences it once shaped. Choyce-Tibbitts points to one of the film’s quieter lines as unexpectedly precise: Stanley Tucci’s character Nigel Kipling, the unwavering art director of Runway, makes a lighthearted yet pointed remark about the ’90s, when magazines operated with seemingly infinite budgets and could “spend three months in Africa” for a photo shoot. This isn’t an exaggeration: In their heyday, annual magazine budgets often ran into the multimillions, funding international shoots, large creative teams and time to cultivate their work into something beautiful and memorable. That pace is now incompatible with a digital-first landscape.
Now, magazines produce content that, according to Nigel, “people watch while they pee.” These fundamental changes in the way that magazines operate have left their most dedicated audiences increasingly niche. “The magazine now has to be a place for the enthusiast,” explains Choyce-Tibbitts. “If they are not deeply invested, they can get that information online. It’s changed from a macro perspective.” (Therein lies the clipping farm.)
Choyce-Tibbitts also reads the sequel as unusually accurate in how it captures the economics of contemporary media. “The power play between the magazine and brands, the ‘no us, no you’ moment between Emily and Miranda, is so real,” he says. What emerges is a system where even cultural institutions function as revenue engines first and storytellers second.
Emmy-nominated journalist (and Rolling Stone’s former Senior Multimedia Editor) Kyle Lamar Rice, who now writes the menswear-culture hybrid Substack The Cultured Swine, wasn’t as swayed by the film's charms.
“I went into the movie with low expectations because I love the original and sequels rarely land in the same way,” he says. For Rice, the issue is not whether the sequel succeeds on the surface, but what it chooses not to confront: The instability of media exists in the background, but never fully enters the frame as Andy Sachs gallivants throughout New York City contending with a new guard of fashionistas and singlehandedly restoring Miranda Priestly’s reputation. While the film acknowledges the Jeff Bezos-sized elephant in the room, it may not fully account for those in the industry left picking up the pieces. “Media is probably in one of the toughest spots it’s ever been in its entire lifespan,” Rice says. “We are at an inflection point — it’s do or die.”
Photo: Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Like Rice, many established writers have left their magazine posts (by way of choice or necessity) and launched their own platforms — be it a Substack or independent title — as editorial roles contracted and independent publishing became both a creative outlet and an economic necessity for survival. But even in all these evolutions, one thing remains the same: an unrelenting dedication to the craft.
Something the film captures across both installments — and that remains an enduring truth of this industry — is that, underneath all its instability and toxicity, is a love for the game that can’t be entirely shaken. Miranda’s now-famous line from the first film — “Don’t be ridiculous, Andy, everybody wants this,” delivered in the car during Paris Fashion Week, remains fairly relevant. While we know the gloss is a façade and the industry is ultimately sustained by hard work and exhaustion in equal measure, there remains an almost intrinsic pull toward it.
“When we were kids, media was pure magic,” recalls Rice. “I think to an extent, a lot of us still have that fight in us. But we also have a better sense of what’s realistic now.”
* This article was originally published here