Meryl Streep gliding back into Miranda Priestly's silver hair and glacial contempt delivers the pleasure audiences came for: the withering look, the sotto voce devastation, the coats dropped on the desk like a verdict. "The Devil Wears Prada 2" understands this completely and luxuriates in it.
As entertainment, it works. As a reckoning with the world it depicts — fashion, publishing, ambition, labor — it is considerably more slippery.
The original 2006 film was never a critique of the industry it portrayed. It was a seduction. Audiences were meant to be horrified by Miranda and end up entranced, which is precisely what happened. Anne Hathaway's Andy escaped, but viewers went home wanting the clothes, the access, the terrifying competence.
The sequel arrives 18 years later into a vastly different media landscape. Condé Nast has shed hundreds of editorial jobs. Vogue's print circulation has collapsed from its peak. AI tools are actively replacing copy editors, fact-checkers and junior writers across the industry. The glossy magazine as a cultural institution is not struggling — in many configurations, it is already gone.
Against this backdrop, a film about the interior politics of a luxury fashion magazine is not neutral territory. It is, whether intentionally or not, a political document.
The sequel gestures toward this new reality. There are conversations about digital disruption, the precarity of print, what Runway means in a world of algorithmic content. Miranda is positioned as a figure quietly, furiously reckoning with obsolescence. This is genuinely interesting dramatic territory, and Streep does extraordinary things with it.
But the film's instinct, whenever it approaches structural issues, is to personalize. The crisis of the industry becomes Miranda's crisis. The question of what happens to workers when institutions collapse gets absorbed into the question of what happens to one extraordinary woman when her power is threatened.
What the sequel does not meaningfully engage with is labor. The assistants — overworked, underpaid, running on ambition and cortisol — remain atmospheric rather than substantial. Their precarity is texture, not subject. In 2006, this felt like a genre convention. In 2025, it reads differently.
A generation of young workers in media, fashion and publishing have organized, struck and spoken publicly about the conditions the original film presented as glamorous hazing. The film has no real language for this. It is not interested in solidarity; it is interested in ascent.
The workplace power fantasy has a politics, even when — especially when — it presents itself as apolitical. The fantasy of the exceptional woman who outsmarts the system and wins the approval of the monster is not the same as imagining a system that doesn't require that sacrifice. "The Devil Wears Prada 2" is very good at the former and entirely uninterested in the latter. That is a legitimate artistic choice. But audiences in 2025 are equipped to notice it.
None of this makes the film unenjoyable. It is sharply directed, beautifully costumed and anchored by a Streep performance that belongs in a different, weightier film about aging and relevance. There are scenes of genuine wit and one or two of genuine feeling.
As a piece of cinema about powerful women navigating a brutal industry, it works. As a cultural document that might have said something true about what that industry has done to the people inside it, it retreats at every threshold.
"The Devil Wears Prada" was always a fantasy. The sequel is a nostalgia trip for that fantasy, arriving at a moment when the reality has become impossible to ignore. A lavish film about the death of lavish magazines has arrived — too polished to quite admit what it's mourning.
