Here is the cruel joke at the heart of The Devil Wears Prada: the movie was supposed to be a warning. A cautionary tale. A horror film dressed in Chanel. Instead, an entire generation of fashion-obsessed dreamers watched it, clocked Miranda Priestly's impossible standards, the 4am phone calls, the soul-crushing errands - and thought, "yes please, sign me up."
And so we did the work. The degrees, the internships, the obsessive magazine dissection, the years of grinding through the industry's notoriously brutal entry levels. We wanted in. Badly.
Then reality showed up wearing head-to-toe Ozempic and AI
According to a review from Dazed Digital, the sequel lands with a thud that feels less like entertainment and more like a mirror held up to an industry in freefall. The fashion media world that an entire generation sacrificed so much to break into is now a very different beast - and not in a fun, dramatic, Miranda Priestly kind of way.
The film apparently tackles the very real and very unsexy realities currently gutting the industry: redundancies, the creeping influence of AI on creative work, and the outsized power of billionaires reshaping media on a whim. Which, if you've been anywhere near a publishing masthead in the last three years, sounds less like a screenplay and more like your group chat.
Why this hits harder than it should
The original film's accidental appeal was its glamour. Even in its darkest moments, it looked incredible. The sequel, it seems, is willing to sit in the unglamorous truth: that the dream many people chased has been restructured, automated, or simply deleted from the org chart.
There is something almost poetic - and by poetic I mean absolutely gutting - about a franchise born from fashion industry idealism returning to document that same industry's slow unraveling. The Prada cinematic universe did not have to come for our career choices like this.
Whether the film is good cinema is almost beside the point. The fact that it's accurate is the real plot twist - and the one nobody asked for.
Read the full review over at Dazed Digital.
