Twenty years after leaving Runway, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) has built a respectable career in journalism — right up until her entire newsroom is laid off by text message during an awards gala. At the same time, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) faces a crisis of her own: a sweatshop scandal involving a major advertiser gives corporate owner Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) the excuse he’s been waiting for to interfere. Runway publishes what should have been a glossy, harmles puff piece on a major fashion brand — only for that brand to be exposed days later for using sweatshop labour. Without Miranda’s consent, Irv hires Andy as Runway’s new features editor, a move that lands like a diplomatic incident.
Miranda, once the terrifying high priestess of fashion, now finds herself hemmed in by HR briefings, “tone workshops,” and a younger staff who don’t instinctively recognise her authority. Print is shrinking, advertisers are restless, and the magazine is being pushed toward cheap digital churn. Andy tries to uphold real journalism, but her long‑form pieces barely register in a world ruled by algorithms.
Andy reunites with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) — now a high‑powered executive whose company’s aggressive pricing strategies symbolise the industry’s moral drift. Meanwhile, tech investors circle Runway, including the serenely confident mogul Evan Roth (played with icy charm by an actor clearly enjoying himself), who sees the magazine not as a cultural institution but as an underperforming asset. As the pressure mounts, Andy becomes central to Miranda’s survival strategy — not as an assistant this time, but as someone who understands both the old world and the new.
The men orbiting Miranda and Andy remain so resolutely beige they could be painted directly onto the set. Kenneth Branagh, as Miranda’s latest husband, drifts through scenes like a distinguished but faintly bewildered museum patron — present, polite, and utterly incapable of matching her gravitational pull. Peter Brammall, playing Andy’s boyfriend Peter, fares no better: a man so gently supportive and narratively weightless he feels less like a romantic partner and more like a well‑meaning flatmate who occasionally remembers they’re dating. And then there’s Stanley Tucci, returning as Nigel, the lone male presence with actual flavour — sharp, warm, and effortlessly charismatic, reminding you how much more alive this world becomes when someone on screen has a pulse stronger than chamomile tea.
Themes: What the Film Tries to Say — and How Well It Says It
The film is preoccupied with change — who drives it, who benefits from it, and who gets crushed beneath it. It contrasts Miranda’s old‑world authority with the frictionless, jargon‑heavy ideology of modern tech.
The “techno‑manosphere” is embodied in nepo‑CEO Jay Ravitz (B.J. Novak) and Emily’s boyfriend Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a mash‑up of Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. They spout shibboleths about “cutting expenses” (meaning people) and the inevitability of technological “progress.” Benji’s mantra — “You just have to get out of the way” — is the distilled essence of their worldview: change as inevitability, disruption as moral good, efficiency as destiny.
A critical planning session with a dozen consultants takes place, improbably, in the packed company cafeteria. When Jay invites Miranda, she asks, with surgical disdain, “Do we have one of those?” It’s one of the few moments where the film remembers who she is.
But the film’s biggest misstep is Miranda herself. The original Miranda was frightening because she embodied taste, hierarchy, and institutional authority at their most refined and ruthless. Here, she has been softened into something almost unrecognisable — tidy, tamed, and constantly shadowed by the moral anxieties of 2026. When we see Miranda struggling to hang up her own coat it’s clear that something has changed. And the dialogue tells us she no longer throws her coat at assistants due to HR complaints. The film seems more interested in showing a tamed Miranda than in understanding why she worked in the first place. The result is not growth; it is defanging.
And yet, the film does land one thematic point beautifully: tech’s victory is not inevitable. Without spoiling anything, the final movement hints at a future shaped not by dashboards but by people who still believe in the value of craft. It’s a quiet, almost stealthy note of hope.
Cameos and Watchability
Despite its flaws, the film is undeniably watchable. The cameos — designers, editors, influencers, and a few sly nods to real‑world fashion royalty — give it a fizzy, knowing energy. Lady Gaga’s brief appearance is a highlight: funny, pointed, and perfectly calibrated.
The film moves briskly, the locations are gorgeous, and the cast is uniformly committed. Hathaway remains a compelling centre of gravity; Blunt steals every scene she’s in; Streep, as Miranda, even in a softened register, still radiates authority. Even the tech bros are entertaining in their buffoonery.
It’s not the sharp, cruel, diamond‑cut satire of the original — but it’s never dull.
Would I See The Devil Wears Prada 3?
Absolutely.
And I’d like to see it go further.
I’d like the PC guff — the HR euphemisms, the corporate tone‑policing, the algorithmic hand‑wringing — to be presented as outdated. I’d like a return to mean Miranda, not just as a bully, but as a woman whose authority comes from taste, judgement, and the ability to see what others can’t.
If this sequel is about the world outgrowing its monsters, the third film should be about the world realising it still needs them. Because the truth is that industries don’t collapse from cruelty; they collapse from complacency. Prada 2 imagines a landscape where the sharp edges have been sanded down, where Miranda’s authority is treated as an embarrassing relic, and where institutions believe they can replace vision with workflow and taste with metrics. But the absence of monsters doesn’t create harmony — it creates drift. Standards loosen, identities blur, and the centre of gravity shifts from people who know what they’re doing to people who know how to present what they’re doing. A third film should confront that reckoning head‑on: the uncomfortable but necessary realisation that the figures once dismissed as tyrants were often the ones holding the whole thing together. Not because they were kind, or gentle, or easy, but because they cared enough to demand more than the world found convenient. We need the monsters and we need to learn how to deal with them.
By Pat Harrington
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