Published May 30, 2026
BY OLIVIA FORT
Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci reunite in “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” directed by David Frankl, a sequel that arrives 20 years after the original and tries to reenter a fashion world where magazines are dying, evil finance bros are everywhere and the once-mythic power of fashion editors has been replaced by algorithms, influencers and whatever Tiktok decides is “in” this week.
The sequel once again follows Andy Sachs (Hathaway) and Miranda Priestly (Streep) as they navigate this new era of media, where the cultural authority of Runway–the movie’s fictional fashion magazine–is threatened by political correctness and the drastic changes of the fashion world.
photo courtesy of walt Disney studios
The cast, as expected, carries the film. The script, unfortunately, doesn’t always rise to meet them. The callbacks to the original are there, but overall cohesion and iconic bite isn’t. The sequel clearly understands it’s set in a different world, it just struggles to translate that awareness into a story that maintains some flow.
On paper, the plot is okay. In reality, it’s far too ambitious. The nearly two-hour movie tries to juggle so many different plots that it feels like a mood board with far too many competing ideas pinned to it.
Andy Sachs, meanwhile, has traded her Chanel and wide-eyed ambition for a millennial PR-manager aesthetic: a young professional in (mostly) neutrals, who looks more likely to work on Wall Street. But the real issue isn’t her wardrobe, it’s her. Sachs still carries the energy of someone eager to impress rather than the confident, determined woman who came out of the first film and is supposed to be 20 years older.
To its credit, the film does manage to tap into the bleak reality of the fashion industry: the collapse of print, vanishing arts budgets, slow death of journalism, AI-driven slop and mass layoffs are all fixtures. It does a decent job at capturing a world where culture feels increasingly disposable, even if the script doesn’t really know what to do with that weight.
But where’s the camp? Where’s the “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.” level of audacity? “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is a glossy sequel with moments of brilliance, but it misses the charm and edge that once made its original movie dominate every girl’s sleepover.
6/10
