🍷 Flavour Profile
Primary Notes: Strong notes of glamour with amber glints of ambition
Secondary Notes: Undertones of institutional power and self-discovery
📜 Provenance
🍽️ Medium: Motion Picture
👤 By: David Frankel
📍 Where I Found It: Pop culture memory, Rewatch Shelf
🍷 Tasting Notes
Who doesn’t remember their first job?
In the early 2000s, it was Andy Sachs moving to New York to become a journalist. In 2019, it was me moving to Bangalore to work in finance.
Prima facie, the film appears to be about the fashion industry, with undertones of the monolithic gravitas of larger-than-life institutions and how power is shaped and wielded. In actuality, it is an elaborate storytelling project in how first jobs are rarely just jobs. They are initiations. They wound us and shape us. They are formative precisely because of the emotional brutality of being broken down and built back up with stronger foundations.
Rewatching The Devil Wears Prada ahead of the theatrical release of its sequel in 2026, after seven years of corporate work experience, allows the story to breathe more richly through my own lived experience. It opened layers of texture and nuance that my teenage self was unable to appreciate through the rose-tinted eyes of naiveté. The unreasonable hours, the impossible demands of excellence, and the pressure of seeking validation that remains mythic in its scarcity now echo with strange familiarity.
The film is a full-bodied construction of a multi-layered core thesis. It captures how institutions teach you new codes, seduce you with glamour, and force you to consider how much of yourself you are willing to trade for belonging.
Often, the pace at which you move inside these institutions leaves very little room for introspection. This, combined with the temptations of prestige, glamour, money, and proximity to power, leaves a lot of us feeling like we are in golden handcuffs, with no real choice in our outcomes.
However, no one, not even Andy, is ever trapped all at once. We are gradually absorbed, tantalised by the rewards of giving ourselves completely. Success and excellence are intoxicating in flavour, and undeniably addictive in nature. The cage is beautiful, and that is why it works.
More of us have been there than we would like to admit — where ambition clouds our vision to the extent that we do not notice the small leaks. The way work bleeds into our relationships, our friendships, our birthday plans, our families, our values, and ultimately, our identities.
The film endures beyond the clothes, the quotable lines, and the glamour because it appeals to something more human: the cycle of growing and outgrowing. It layers the nuance of understanding that it is not changing to adapt that is dangerous, but changing without noticing.
This is only more masterfully underscored by the fact that when Andy does walk away, it is not a rejection of fashion or even Miranda. Nor is it from a place of intellectual superiority, as it was in the beginning. It is a recapture of agency, born from the revelation that she can choose differently.
✨ The Finish
🕯️ What Stayed: Miranda’s monologue on cerulean blue remains a powerfully delivered lesson in humility. It teaches us that we are almost never fully outside the systems we exempt ourselves from.
💬 If you asked me: The Devil Wears Prada remains iconic for the fashion, the dialogue, and the aspirational glamour — but most importantly, for the rare clarity with which it explores ambition..
🏷️ Vintage
Released: 2006
📝 Footnotes:
Where to Find the Film: YouTube – The Devil Wears Prada
**Photos below taken while watching on TV
The Big Smokey Apple 