The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026 film)

Is the sequel ever better than the original? In the case of The Devil Wears Prada 2, that was the whole point – nothing lasts forever, and whatever alliances have been built in the past and sustained in the present are not necessarily going to last into the future. This film is (for what it is) very well written. The storyline wasn’t exactly gripping, partly because it’s about the lamenting of the slow death of print media. At least Runway, the fashion magazine still led by Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), has moved with the times. Most of their content is digital, and most of their readership – if you can call subscribers who largely gawp at fashion photographs ‘readers’ – use the Runway app.

Having little interest in fashion myself, I offer no comment on the wardrobe choices, suffice to say there wasn’t anyone wearing anything (as far as I could tell) that someone feasibly wouldn’t wear whenever they were doing whatever they were doing. This extends to the fashion catwalk models themselves, who were only wearing the sort of weird stuff that would be unusual to see anyone wearing anywhere else. Granted, there’s an aura of predictability about all that, as there is about redundancies in journalism. Loyalty counts for nothing these days, and it was interesting and amusing to observe Priestly having to adjust to a change of leadership at Runway’s parent company, publishing house Elias-Clarke.

At some point, it appears complaints went to human resources at Elias-Clarke about Priestly’s conduct, though she still retains about as much iciness as she can muster. Her sharp tongue, however, is regularly subjected to curtailments by way of Amari Mari (Simone Ashley), her ‘first assistant’, who diplomatically cuts in during staff meetings to stop Priestly from saying something that will land her into yet more trouble. And so it is that Priestly, who once bossed assistants around to get coffees and lunch for her, now finds herself (shock horror) putting her own jacket up on a peg in her still ridiculously large office, and flying on a transatlantic jet in economy class.

The straitjacketed Priestly still has some influence, however, and the character development was, at least to me, quite remarkable to witness. The glory days are over, but she still clings to whatever power she still has. I don’t think I’ve seen Dior featured so heavily in anything since seeing the musical Flowers for Mrs Harris (in which the central character heads to House of Dior in Paris to buy a dress) – here, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), who once worked for Priestly, is some sort of executive at Dior. Well, until she thinks of herself too highly and fails to look before she leaps. The humbling of the once exalted becomes a running theme in this film – there is no need to ‘gird your loins’ (what on earth did that ever even mean?) this time around.

Four stars