You Couldn't Make ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Today
Image; created by Alex Mell-Taylor
The movie The Devil Wears Prada lingers in the public consciousness, even fifteen years after it first aired in 2006. We still see Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in memes, as people quote gifs of her oneliners, such as “You have no sense of fashion” or “By all means move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me” to their friends in threads. The fanbase has remained active to this day, with the official page still maintaining over 2 million followers on Facebook.
It’s an IP constantly being tapped into and remade. The original author of the novel has published two sequels: Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns and When Life Gives You Lululemons. There will be a musical adaptation released in 2022, and there have been talks over the years from various studios trying to remake it — though none of these have come to fruition so far.
However, when we revisit the movie that sparked the phenomenon, the story is almost chilling in retrospect. It is not as light and fun as we remember but rather depicts an abusive boss, revered for her cruelty. Miranda is, quite frankly, a terrible person, and our glorification of her as an icon speaks to our society’s unhealthy norms regarding work.
Norms which, thankfully, might be changing for the better.
For those of you unaware, the movie is about a young twenty-something named Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) who wants to be a journalist. Andrea, or Andy as she likes to be called, lands a job as the second personal assistant for fashion icon Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor of Runway Magazine. Miranda is sometimes believed to be loosely modeled after Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the books. The movie, and the book from which it is based, follow Andy through a year as Miranda's personal assistant and the ups and downs that that entails.
Watching the 2006 movie is disconcerting, to say the least. Miranda, and in fact, the entire work culture she fosters, is exceedingly cruel. She openly berates her staff, telling her employees that they are “incompetent,” “inadequate,” or “disappointing.” She does not take constructive feedback and often refuses to be questioned at all. Her leadership style is dictatorial, and she exercises that control in the pettiest of ways.
There is a scene early on where Miranda enters an elevator occupied by another woman at the company. This woman apologizes to her and immediately leaves the elevator so Miranda can ride it alone. The implication seems to be clear. She is a boss who does not care to interact with her subordinates, yet they must assume her whims and desires without her uttering a word. Throughout, the film Andy spends most of her time trying to guess the desires of Miranda, who does not expound upon her wants and treats failure with hurtful words and impossible demands.
This meanspiritedness filters down to everyone in the corporate hierarchy. The barbs' Runway staff members say to each other are likewise cruel, often replicating the worst aspects of the fashion industry. “Who is that sad little person? Are we doing a before and after piece I don’t know about?” the character Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) says upon seeing Andy for the first time. Andy faces repeated bullying throughout the film from nearly all of her peers. These comments are mean for the sake of it, and workers have taken their lives for far less.
The workplace of Runway is not just psychologically tortuous, however, but also physically dangerous. We learn early on in the movie that the phones must be answered at all times, which should take priority even over going to the bathroom. It should be noted that doing so is unsafe, as holding in human waste can lead to medical problems over time, such as weakening your bladder muscles or an increase in urinary tract and bladder infections. It’s generally not life-threatening, but it's not pleasant.
The movie doubles down on the alleged hilarity of this premise and has Miranda’s first assistant Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), tell us a story about how one time an assistant left the desk because she sliced her hand open with a letter opener. This resulted in Miranda missing an important call, which, Emily implies, led to the assistant's termination and blocklisting. “She now works at TV Guide,” Emily lectures, treating a chilling incident as frivolous.
Speaking of Emily, halfway through the film, she gets sick. In a scene that has aged very poorly in the age of COVID, she is required to not only keep working but attend a benefit with hundreds of people. It was difficult to watch Emily touch things and whisper into Miranda’s ear, as it's hard not to imagine all the people she was infecting. It reflects a not too distant time period when the expectation was for workers to work through sickness. One we have not entirely shed, even now, during the middle of a pandemic.
Miranda constantly uses her leverage over her workers as a cudgel to get them to do morally questionable things. When she decides to take Andy to Paris over her assistant Emily, she uses the possibility of blocklisting to get her to comply. “If you don’t go,” she says cooly, “I’ll assume you’re not serious about your future at Runway or any other publication. The decisions yours.” Miranda frames this decision as one of choice (a theme that comes up repeatedly in the film), but that framing ignores the power dynamics happening in this scene. One of the most powerful women in publishing is telling a young twenty-something she must do something or never work again in her preferred industry — there is no choice there.
In the original book, all the actions mentioned so far paint Miranda as the villain. Andy ends up losing her job during the book's climax because she feels like she can’t visit her friend, who is in a coma in the hospital, without getting fired. She tells Miranda, “F@ck You” in public after she is given the impossible task of renewing her daughter's passport in only 12 hours. Miranda fires her then and there on the spot.
In the movie, however, there is no friend in a coma. Her objections are more philosophical than personal. Andy politely leaves Miranda by going out the other door of a limo. She then throws her phone into a fountain, cutting her ties with her boss in a nicer and less confrontational way than in the book. Miranda ends up giving Andy a reference, and we finish the film with her smiling about Andy, something we are told she rarely does.
The context of Miranda’s abuse is, if not erased, massaged to give us the impression that she is not that bad. We are meant to view her actions as a necessary component of her success and the success of her employees.
Miranda is an abusive boss, but we as the viewer don’t walk away thinking that because of how work is framed in the movie (i.e., film speak for the intended message meant to be conveyed to the viewer). The film spends a lot of time validating the perspective that work should be totalizing and difficult. The main character is chastised several times for not taking her position seriously. She is told over three times that her job is one that a million girls would “kill for.” At one point, she goes to Art Director Nigel to complain about how hard of a time she is having, and rather than sympathize, he condescends to her about how she does not appreciate the job enough:
“…this place, where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t kiss you on the forehead and give you a gold star on your homework at the end of the day. Wake up, sweetheart.”
Although Andy ultimately leaves this toxic work environment, the film is all about glorifying her hustle. We are meant to respect her learning the ropes in this grueling industry and think of her story as to how things are supposed to be done. After a lot of hard work, Andy gets a reference from Miranda and moves toward her dream job as a journalist. She lands a position working for a mid-tier newspaper, getting her that much closer to The New Yorker. She may not like Miranda, but she begrudgingly respects her, waving her an appreciative goodbye near the film's end.
Of course, in real life, abusive bosses do not always lead to career breaks. Many people give a lot of time to their work, only for them to be left with nothing. The source material recognizes this reality by having Miranda blocklist Andy after her breakdown in Paris. Andy suffers material consequences for resisting the whims of her boss and has to essentially restart her career, albeit in a very expedited fashion.
This has a real-life parallel to Anna Wintour, who has a long, whispered history about retaliating against those she has perceived as wronging her. The creators of The Devil Wear Prada film, in fact, had trouble getting designers to provide clothes or feedback for fear of angering Anna Wintour. They even had trouble securing New York apartment buildings as filming locations for Miranda's house for the same reason. “…the co-op boards wouldn’t let us in,” Director David Frankel said in an interview. “We went for weeks being unable to secure locations!”
The film doesn’t want to recreate that ugly reality, not only because it would have been a liability for them during filming but also because the main creative forces behind this film perceive the abuse we have talked about as a necessary component of creation. As the film Director David Frankel says of the original book: “Miranda was a witch, and Andy’s motivation was to get her revenge. There was a lot of conflict that ended with Miranda being humiliated. I felt that wasn’t satisfying. My view was that we should be grateful for excellence. Why do the excellent people have to be nice?”
It’s a position that ends up glorifying successful people regardless of the abuse they cause. This viewpoint means that the film has a near reverence for Miranda as a character. It frames her as a necessary force that gets things done. This is perfectly encapsulated in the infamous cerulean monologue where Miranda lectures Andy on how important fashion, and by extension, her directorship, is to the world at large:
“…that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room….”
This monologue was added at the insistence of Meryl Streep herself, who wanted to make the character more empathetic — a desire that perfectly fits director Frankel's vision to have Miranda be the heroine. Miranda may be tough, the film seems to argue, but she is making the world turn.
Since Miranda is a villain in the original work, however, that meant having to downplay and change many of the more critical elements in the book. For example, Andy’s friend Lily is a successful artist in the movie, whose critical of Andy for not spending enough time with her and her boyfriend. Her jabs come off as self-centered rather than empathetic because Andy is only doing this position for a year as a stepping stone to get her dream job: something you would think a true friend would understand.
In the book, however, Lily is Andy's roommate, and she has a worsening alcohol problem due to buckling under the strain of graduate school. Andy feels progressively guiltier for not being able to help due to her jampacked work schedule. Lily’s alcoholism culminates in a car crash that places her in a coma. Lily’s position in the narrative is a lesson in how “hustle culture” not only can harm ourselves but those we care about. It makes us withdrawn and forces us to rely on bad coping mechanisms to get through the day.
Likewise, in the movie, Andy’s boyfriend, Nate Cooper (Adrian Grenier), is a chef who comes off as spoiled and entitled to many viewers for his insistence that Andy spends less time at work. As Sana Schwartz writes in Entertainment Weekly: “…[Nate] is kind of the worst. He mocks [Andy] for her new interest in fashion, he trivializes the magazine she works at, and dismisses her hard work. And, perhaps most egregiously, he tantrums about Andy missing his birthday dinner because she had to work an important gala — a major step up for her at her job.”
However, in the book, her boyfriend Alex Fineman has an equally demanding job of his own. He’s a teacher in the Bronx working for Teach for America, which is often a very stressful position in its own right. His concern for Andy comes not from a lack of understanding over hard work but because she stops prioritizing him in the relationship. The event he throws a “tantrum over” in the books is not a birthday dinner, but Andy going to Paris last minute instead of going to homecoming with him. He had already booked hotel rooms for this event on a teacher's salary and moved around his schedule. It was the last straw in a year of hasty cancellations.
The film pulls these punches because it doesn’t want the viewer to think too deeply about the harm Miranda has placed on her workers. Her abuse doesn’t simply inflict emotional harm on her subordinates but has ripple effects that lead to physical and psychological harm. It's hard to think about these plot beats as merely trivial complaints when you center your empathy on beleaguered workers, rather than bosses who rule the world of fashion with an iron fist.
The Devil Wears Prada is a relic of a time when work was everything, and over the years, we have started to question the problems that can come from this type of glorification.
Two years after The Devil Wears Prada was released, the US economy tanked due to a collapse in the housing market in what would almost immediately be labeled the “Great Recession.” This happened because of the greed of certain financiers, many of which faced no penalties, as they inflated the housing market with toxic subprime mortgages.
The Great Recession was the beginning of a popular reckoning with the wealthy. We saw the emergence of Occupy Wallstreet, a protest movement against economic inequality that was the genesis for many modern-day movements, from the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America to the presidential run of Bernie Sanders.
One year later, during the middle of the recession, Confessions of a Shopaholic was released in theaters. It was a film about a woman with a shopping addiction who aspired to work for the fashion magazine Alette — an almost inverse of The Devil Wears Prada. The film’s producers agonized over the release as they reshot its ending to be more mindful of America's new economic woes, but it did little to quell critics. It was still panned in theaters as being insensitive. “This sickening ode to consumerist greed comes just in time for the recession,” quipped Anthony Quinn in the Independent.
In many ways, that anger has not gone away. Wealth inequality has only increased, metastasizing into a hustle culture that is not just necessary to get ahead in your career but to pay the bills at all. The rich are more hated than ever. The winners of film awards now appear to be class-conscious titles such as Parasite that skewer the rich. While billionaire Tony Stark launched the MCU over a decade ago, now our heroes are poor hustlers like Sokovian refuge Wanda Maximoff in Wandavision, orphan scavenger Rey in Star Wars, and more.
When I say you couldn't make The Devil Wears Prada, I don’t mean a remake of the property couldn't technically happen, but that the norms it embodied would not fly today. We are increasingly coming to question the idea that the alleged genius of the powerful justifies the cruelty toward those they command. The rich and powerful still have their blind followers, but they also must struggle against an emerging ecosystem of people who hate them.
It was a given that you didn’t question the abuse of your bosses in the 2000s, but today, the fashionable thing is to question why that abuse is even necessary in the first place.