Twenty years ago, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) didn’t explain herself. She didn’t have to. She ran Runway, she ran the room, and if you didn’t know what cerulean was, that was your problem. But The Devil Wears Prada 2 is set in a very different landscape, one where the magazine industry is haemorrhaging, Gen Z assistants speak up without flinching, and the most powerful woman in fashion is fighting to keep her empire from quietly dissolving beneath her Valentino-clad feet.
The film depicts Miranda’s life in its most complicated era, where, through it all, she remains the most magnetic person in any room she walks into.
An empire under siege
The sequel, directed once again by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, picks up the threads deliberately left hanging at the end of the 2006 original – the moment Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) flung her phone into a Parisian fountain and walked away from the world Runway represented. But while Andy has spent two decades building a credible, award-winning journalism career, Miranda has spent that same time doing what she has always done. The difference now, however, is the cost.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins when Miranda is on top of the world, yet at the same time, there’s an earthquake under her feet,” Streep explained in a Q&A with production.
“The brand is being threatened, and the business model of magazines is disintegrating, and in some ways, the movie is about how to run a cogent or viable company while navigating new waters.”
It’s a tension that Frankel describes as one of the sequel’s most compelling dramatic questions.
“The question of how Miranda Priestly would preside over the demise of her empire became fascinating to us. When is it time to go? How do you keep doing this?” he said.
For a character so fundamentally defined by control, the answer, for now at least, appears to be: you don’t stop. You simply adapt, or pretend to.
Still mean, just more aware of it
One of the more quietly fascinating threads running through the sequel is the question of whether Miranda has changed at all, and the answer, according to both Streep and the creative team, is nuanced.
She’s probably a teensy bit meaner. You give considerably fewer f…considerations to what you say.
But beneath the still-sharp exterior is a woman increasingly aware of how much she depends on the people around her – and how much of what she’s built could slip away.
Brosh McKenna frames it beautifully, saying, “I don’t know that people fundamentally change their essence, but they do evolve with what’s happening in the culture, especially because that’s her job. Her job is to understand what people are responding to, what people are wearing, what people are saying, what people are reading.”
What the sequel adds, and what makes it genuinely interesting as a character study, is that Miranda must now navigate all of this as a woman in her mid-seventies, presiding over a workforce that no longer operates by the same unspoken rules. Gone is the assistant who shook in the corridor. In her place: Amari (Simone Ashley).
Ashley, who plays Miranda’s new assistant Amari, is perhaps the most telling addition to the Runway world. Where the original film gave us Emily Charlton (brilliant, brittle, and utterly terrified), Amari arrives fully formed, self-possessed, and, crucially, unintimidated.
“Runway has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Workplace politics and rules have changed, and in Amari, we see an assistant that’s no longer cowering in fear, but is kind of keeping Miranda in check,” said Ashley.
“I think we are in a time where younger people are articulating their voices in a much louder and clearer way than before.”
Streep, for her part, was clearly delighted by this dynamic. “She sits at her feet and has picked up all the best and the worst of Miranda,” she said of Ashley’s portrayal. “She’s like a Miranda-in-training, which was hilarious.”
The fashion has kept up, and so has Miranda
Of course, no conversation about The Devil Wears Prada is complete without talking about the clothes, and the sequel makes no apologies for going bigger, bolder and more deliberate on that front.
The sequel had a significantly larger budget, according to Streep, who told Stephen Colbert in an April interview that “they spent the money” this time, unlike the original, which had to scramble due to studio scepticism.
A recent EMEA press conference, which The Citizen attended virtually, offered a telling moment when Anne Hathaway revealed she had personally pushed for the film’s fashion montage sequence.
“I just really wanted to feed the audience,” she said, describing how she went to director David Frankel to argue for an extended fashion showcase set in Milan, a sequence designed, in part, to give fans something they genuinely hadn’t already seen leaked online that also served as a callback to the first film.
Costume designer Molly Rogers, who stepped into the legendary shoes of Patricia Field, brought a clear guiding philosophy to Miranda’s wardrobe, specifically: it had to feel like a uniform. “We looked to people like Karl Lagerfeld, who stuck to a uniform that just worked,” Rogers explained in the production notes. “In the first movie, we had cropped jackets and pencil skirts, so that was our roadmap for the sequel.” The silhouette is consistent – controlled, deliberate – in the same way Miranda herself is.
And yet, in one of the sequel’s most quietly brilliant details, not everything about Miranda’s look is couture. For the film’s gala, she wears a one-of-a-kind red ballgown created by Pierpaolo Piccioli for Balenciaga, but her signature silver hoop earrings? Those were sourced by Streep herself from a CVS.
What the press conference makes clear is that fashion in this sequel isn’t decoration, it’s argument. As Streep put it, reflecting on the film’s broader stakes:
Fashion is still incredibly exciting, creative and influential. It’s more inclusive of every body and every gender. It’s coming from somebody’s singular vision for their runway show, for their couture show. It’s still so inspiring. It’s not something you can do with AI.
That last line lands with particular weight in a film that grapples directly with the technological forces disrupting the media industries Miranda has spent her career commanding.
What 20 years actually changes
Physically, Streep is clear-eyed about what age brings to the role.
“She’s 76, not 56, so that’s different. She has less hair,” she said, explaining how the wig from the original film was restyled to reflect that passage of time, sleeked back, stripped of some of its volume.
And it is that evolution – more than the fashion, more than the new cast, more than the location work in Milan – that gives The Devil Wears Prada 2 its reason for existing. Brosh McKenna puts it plainly: “If the first movie was a bildungsroman where a young person is learning who they are in the world, the sequel is about a mature woman facing the reality of all the choices she’s made in her life.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 hits cinemas on 1 May 2026.
