🍷 Flavour Profile
Primary Notes: Prominent notes of becoming, threaded with the humbling necessity of reinvention
Secondary Notes: Lingering undertones of nostalgia and the finesse of professional maturity
Tertiary Notes: Glimmers of performed excellence, paired with the softening effects of age
📜 Provenance
🍽️ Medium: Motion Picture
👤 By: David Frankel
📍 Where I Found It: Cultural Memory | General Press for the Sequel
🍷 Tasting Notes
For anyone who has ever loved a film, the news of its sequel is likely met with nervous skepticism and anticipatory joy. The Devil Wears Prada 2 was no different. Who doesn’t want to witness Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci work their Runway magic again? Is it humanly possible to improve on perfection?
The film opens twenty years on. It is a testament to the careful world-building that everything feels like it has evolved naturally — iPhones have replaced flip phones, office floor plans look different, memes and AI have become the lingua franca. Without leaning on excessive exposition, the film shows us that the Andy who walked out of Runway in 2006 has gone on to a successful career in journalism — only to find out, alongside her entire newsroom, that she has been laid off by group text during an awards gala. Meanwhile, Runway, having spent the last twenty years repositioning itself toward digital to stave off irrelevance, now finds itself ravaged by scandal in a world held ransom by cancel culture.
With Andy in need of a new job and Runway in need of image repair, the two paths cross again. Andy finds herself back on old stomping grounds, and the room is almost exactly as she left it — Miranda is still Miranda, the assistants still staff the desks with their lives, and the corridors still reek of fashion-week panic. Then, in a surgically crafted moment of movie storytelling, Miranda walks in, takes off her coat, and hangs it up herself. Everything has changed and nothing has.
You might be asking yourself — why does Andy go back? Wasn’t the point of the first film that she escaped a toxic workplace? Writing Aftertaste: The Devil Wears Prada, I reflected on how the first film concerned itself with the golden handcuffs of powerful institutions, and on how its ending was a quiet recapture of agency — a reminder that we can choose differently. But 2006 Andy did not leave Runway unchanged. A part of her loved it. At 23, she needed to leave. At 43, she comes back because she can — established, self-assured, and able to re-engage on her own terms.
Meryl Streep’s choice for Miranda takes careful watching. Miranda is a tad softer, but the softening has not undone her. She is still herself, still excellent at what she does, and terrifying when she needs to be.
The sequel’s brilliance lies in its fidelity to the non-linear arc of real careers — the need for reinvention, the cost of ambition, the work of remaining yourself while still allowing yourself to grow. You see it in the small things — a softened cadence that the Miranda of twenty years ago would never have allowed herself, and the fact that Andy now dresses sharply but still thrifts.
As the film braces to deliver its closing thought, Miranda tells Andy to go ahead and write the book she has been commissioned to write about her — and to keep all the juicy bits in, because “people should know there is a cost.” The film could have ended the exchange there. It chooses, instead, to let Miranda go one step further. “But boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” — the line the first film made us wait twenty years to hear. It reads as a quiet reverence for powerful women. Almost confessional in tone, it is saying, “The cost is real but I would pay it again.”
In the final scene, Andy is wearing a cerulean sweater, updated slightly for who she is now. It is the film answering its own most famous monologue, twenty years on. Andy did not escape fashion’s influence, nor did she disappear into it. She absorbed it.
She made it hers.
✨ The Finish
🕯️ What Stayed: “People should know. They should know there’s a cost. But boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?”
💬 If you asked me: The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a remarkably well-executed sequel to an all-time classic. It does not try to improve on a beloved original but inherits it..
🏷️ Vintage
Released: May 1, 2026 | Watched: May 2, 2026
📝 Footnotes:
Where to Find the Film: In Theatres
The Big Smokey Apple 