Review of The Devil Wears Prada, directed by David Frankel

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I feel like a lot of my blog introductions, especially when it comes to movies, have been lamenting on the fact I don’t have a ton of time lately. I used to work as a film critic (which, in fact, was so incredibly underpaid that I now make more off of this blog’s display ads than I ever did publishing anywhere else), and then when I was in graduate school I was writing a lot about film, so I used to watch so many movies.

But now I work an 8-5, come home, and then doom scroll my evenings away instead of watching the movies I used to love so dearly. And recently I realized I want to stop doing that, so I’ve set limits on my phone and am fully prepared to sit back and watch more movies and read more books in order to feed my brain.

Sometimes, though, I watch movies just to rot my brain. After a long day of work that’s what you need often, and that’s how I ended up watching The Devil Wears Prada after all of these years.

I had just seen the sequel in theaters with my sister, so I decided it was time to revisit the movie. It felt weird to come back to this as an adult, as I had worked as a journalist and gone to the Fashion Institute of Technology with a naive dream of becoming like Andy.

Enough about me though. Let’s get into the review!

Aspiring journalist Andy finds herself working at one of the biggest fashion magazines in New York—despite her lack of fashion knowledge.

Our main character in this movie is Andrea, who goes by Andy. She’s fresh out of college, from Northwestern University, and she wants to be a journalist. But to get there, she has to take some jobs: including being a personal assistant to the ghastly Miranda Priestley at Runway.

Modeled after Anna Wintour in real life, Miranda is someone who treats the coworkers and people around her with cruelty. Andy realizes pretty quickly that Miranda isn’t too kind and that this isn’t a place she wants to stick around in, but she’s willing to stay until she can find a more serious journalism job in the city.

Andy also clashes with Emily, the senior assistant at the job, and finds that her lack of fashion knowledge is a hindrance. When she fails to get Miranda back from Miami due to a hurricane, it creates a further stain on her record at the company.

She then befriends Nigel, the art director, and asks him for help. He aids her in getting more stylish clothes to fit in at the magazine, and Andy focuses more on the job itself. Miranda notices and gives her more important things to do, doing better than Emily, who’s going on a dangerous diet for Paris Fashion Week.

When Emily falls ill and is unable to do her job properly at a benefit, Andy steps up and impresses Miranda. Miranda then decides to bring Andy to Paris Fashion Week, much to Emily’s ire, but Andy’s boyfriend breaks up with her and berates Andy for becoming like the same women she once mocked.

It’s in Paris though that Andy discovers Miranda’s husband is getting a divorce. Nigel also tells Andy that he’s trying to get a new position, and when she discovers that there’s a plot to replace Miranda with the French version of her, she tells Miranda and is then turned away.

The very next day Miranda throws Nigel under the bus for the job he wanted, as it will save her position. Andy is disturbed by this, but Miranda directly jabs at her and says she did the same thing to Emily. Andy leaves and throws her phone into the fountain, heading back to New York.

She sees her ex-boyfriend and agrees to stay in touch. She goes to a job interview and the interviewer tells her that Miranda told him that it would be a mistake not to hire her.

Andy gets the job. She calls Emily and tells her she will give her the clothes she got in Paris. She then sees Miranda outside the Runway office and waves, but Miranda pretends not to see her and smiles in her car, out of sight.

Overall Thoughts

I feel like after all of these years The Devil Wears Prada is still a classic, even with 20 years going by. Sure there are some corny parts, but it adds to the charm. It’s also very much a time capsule of a time where idealistic people would go into fashion and make a name for themselves.

All of this is to say that I enjoyed rewatching this a lot. I mentioned before I was like Andy. I didn’t know much about fashion when I suddenly found myself at the best fashion school in the world. It was a huge learning curve and there were a lot of people like Miranda along the way.

There’s a lot of truth in this movie beyond the cult status—I think that’s what I’m trying to get at. I really liked coming back to it as an adult living through something similar because of that.

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