The following review contains mild spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada 2.If I were to pick out a proverbial cerulean blue belt out of the vault that is The Devil Wears Prada 2, it’d be the self-awareness with which the sequel updates fashion’s old hierarchies for a new era. The sequel isn’t pure nostalgia bait, nor does it fully break from what came before it. It retains just enough from the previous instalment to honour the original film’s DNA, yet takes enough risks to complicate the film’s premise and explore the modern anxieties around the decline of print industry.'Journalism Still F***ing Matters'The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens with Andrea Sachs—the socially awkward, dorky journalism prodigy—winning a prestigious award for her reporting, only to be fired by her boss via text minutes later. Andy, now jobless, laments just how commonplace layoffs and downsizing are. As fate would have it, she finds her way back to the ruthless corridors of Runway to help Miranda and Nigel mitigate a PR crisis that is devouring the magazine in real-time.Meryl Streep reprises her iconic role as Miranda Priestly.Miranda Priestly, the unsparing ice-queen who, in the Y2K era, would make assistants quake in their Jimmy Choos and question their life choices, seems to have lost some of her edge. Gone are the days when Priestly threw coats and her bag at her assistants. The HR at Runway has received more than a few complaints, so the fashion doyen must, by all means, hang her own coats. She must also suck up to advertisers, appease them, sell them ad space and promise them features just so they wouldn’t cut funding. The once-invincible Miranda has negative aura points. While the OG fans of the franchise might find this change unpalatable, I cannot help but laud director David Frankel and writer Aline Brosh McKenna for this departure, for it is rooted in reality—fashion editors are no longer as powerful as they once were which signals a deeper rot in the system.The rooms where Miranda commanded power and respect—while they haven’t entirely dismissed her—have begun to undermine her authority, “The September issue is so thin, you could floss with it”, Miranda tells Andy at one point. In a telling scene, Nigel admits: “Runway stopped being a magazine years ago. We are digital. We are downloadable. We shoot content that people watch while they pee”. While humorous on the surface, these lines have a subliminal sadness to them. Beneath the wit lies the erosion of print’s authority—the slow unravelling of a medium that once held pop culture in a chokehold, now giving way to an endless churn of disposable, algorithm-driven content.‘Matka King’ Review: A Flawed but Compelling Rise of a Gambling DonThe Death of an Era, Elegantly StagedThroughout the film, this sadness simmers and grows stronger in intensity through multiple scenes, each making this loss harder to ignore. When Miranda is forced to fly economy due to budget cuts or when a bunch of MBA graduates tell Miranda about their decision to downsize Runway, it is obvious that the old order no longer commands the room; it’s being quietly, methodically rewritten. This sadness finds its sharpest articulation when Andy says: “We can’t just keep sucking the soul out of everything and gutting it and repackaging it”. With this line Andy captures, with disarming precision, the hopelessness that an entire generation of millennials and GenZ feel about the rise of AI and the layoffs.Anne Hathaway returns as Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada 2.This is when the film stops being about fashion and its message becomes universal in a way that not just fashion designers or journalists, but even the tech bros would relate to.Perhaps, all of us can unanimously agree that everything feels crappy post-Covid. It was the same universality of experience—of getting a job and working in a toxic work environment—that made the original The Devil Wears Prada so memorable.Anxiety, But Make It CoutureThe sequel shines the most when it grapples with philosophical questions about change. In a scene, a man tells Miranda: “The world is about change. That is what human beings don’t understand.” Must we embrace change even if it comes at the cost of our values? Must everything be AI-generated, algorithm-driven slop? More importantly: Why can’t we have nice things anymore? The film asks these rather compelling questions and makes the viewer sit with the discomfort of pondering over them.Emily Blunt, Stanley Tucci and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada 2.However, none of this sadness takes away from the humour of the film which is cutting as ever. Miranda throws plenty of zingers and quoteworthy lines in her edit meetings that will have you chuckling under your breath. “May my suicide be brief and painless”, she says when one of her subordinate inevitably disappoint her. As for Nigel, he continues to loan Andy high-fashion looks from Runway’s vault—on the strict condition they’re returned stain-free. Emily, meanwhile, is running Dior. She is still as high-strung and neurotic as she was in 2006. She recently divorced a ‘pathological narcissist’ and now has kids. Emily is so anxious that her anxiety has anxiety. It’s this familiar, finely tuned chaos that keeps the film wickedly entertaining.2016 Was the Year Bollywood Stood At a CrossroadsThe Runway Family ExpandsThe sequel brings in a slate of new cast members. Simone Ashley is Amari, Miranda’s first assistant. Caleb Hearon is Charlie, Miranda’s second assistant. Perhaps the most affecting addition is that of Helen J Shen as Jin Chao, Andy’s assistant who isn’t particularly keen on fashion and has a degree from an Ivy league college. Jin is Andy’s spiritual successor; she follows in her footsteps and carries the same quiet defiance—usually associated with GenZ kids—as Andy did in her Y2K era.Bridgerton's Simone Ashley in The Devil Wears Prada 2.As for the performances, Meryl Streep proves yet again that she is in a league of her own. She plays the ‘ice-queen who has lost her edge’ with the kind of finesse only she can summon. Her acting chops are particularly impressive in a scene at a party where one of the guests collapses on the ground. Anne Hathaway channels the frustrations of an idealist really well. She makes us root for Andy as if she is the last holdout of a collapsing system. Emily Blunt is just as cold and sardonic in her portrayal of Emily as she was in the OG film. Her thick British accent and dramatic gesticulations are very neurotic-coded. Stanley Tucci as Nigel is just the father figure we wish we all had. He watches over Andy like a disapproving parent who knows that she must learn some lessons the hard way.Ozempic, Optics, and Other HorrorsThe film has a new lingo for all the cosmetic procedures, diet fads, and beauty trends that are taking over the world of fashion. In a scene, we hear a woman talk about how someone she knew took so much Ozempic that she ‘projectile vomited’. I watched in abject horror as I learnt about a new cosmetic procedure called ‘trachea elimination’—it gives the neck a more feminine contour.“Thank God I am not a fashion model”, I thought to myself as Miranda quite hilariously called a set of models ‘body negative’—a cheeky way of calling them fat—which might probably be the only time the film flirts with politically incorrect humour. That and Andy reminding Miranda that she is the ‘smart, fat girl’ she once hired are the only two times the film comes close to emulating the unhinged, problematic 2000s irreverence—and thank God for that.Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada 2.The film is peppered with cameos, with Lady Gaga’s now not-so-secret appearance drawing the most attention. Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace and Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach also make an appearance. The film’s soundtrack is simply iconic. Among some of the original songs are Lady Gaga and Doechii’s single Runway, Lady Gaga’s Shape of a Woman (featuring a surprise performance by the singer), Miley Cyrus’ Walk of Fame and Madonna’s 1990 classic number Vogue. The soundtrack is giving high fashion and that’s exactly what the film needed.The Devil Wears Prada 2 is an incredible…pile of stuff. By no means does it move at a glacial pace, and it will keep you hooked with just the right twists in between. It may not match its predecessor’s rewatch value, nor does it surpass its greatness, but it remains oddly compelling.What it does achieve—rather strikingly—is capturing the sharp contrast between the Y2K era and the 2020s with clarity and bite. The details of its competence must interest all of you. If not groundbreaking, it is quietly impressive . That’s all.'Michael' Review: The Way You Make Me Feel…Is Disappointed(Deepansh Duggal is a film critic based out of New Delhi. His work has appeared in Hindustan Times, OPEN, Outlook, Frontline Magazine and The Economic Times. He has a particular interest in anti-capitalist narratives and films that lie at the intersection of power and ideology. This is an opinion article and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)