There’s a particular kind of nostalgia that doesn’t hit you gently. It arrives in a rush, a flood of memory so vivid you can almost smell the glossy pages. That’s what The Devil Wears Prada 2 is doing to a generation of women right now, and if you’re somewhere in your sixties, there’s a very good reason it feels so personal.
The original film landed in 2006, but the world it depicted, the razor sharp hierarchy of a great fashion magazine, the impossible glamour, the terrifying power of a woman at the top, belonged to the 1990s. If you were in your thirties or forties back then, you lived through the heyday of Vogue as a cultural force unlike anything that exists today. A single issue could shift what the world thought was beautiful. A cover could make a career. The editor in chief was not just a media figure, she was an oracle.
Now, two decades after Meryl Streep made Miranda Priestly into one of cinema’s great ice queens, she’s back. The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens on May 1, reuniting the full original cast, Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, in a story that finds Miranda navigating the collapse of print media and the shifting sands of fashion power. Andy returns to Runway as Features Editor, while Emily, now a luxury brand executive, holds the purse strings that could save the magazine. The world has changed, and Miranda must change with it or be left behind.
The question is whether the magic can survive the update.
The buzz around this film has been extraordinary. The first teaser trailer, released last November, reportedly became the most viewed comedy trailer in 15 years, clocking 181 million views in its first 24 hours. The full trailer, dropped in February, smashed that record again. Clearly, the appetite for this story, for these women, for this particular brand of fierce ambition, has never gone away.
And alongside all the trailer chatter, something more interesting has been happening. Vogue’s own podcast, Run Through with Vogue, has been pulling back the curtain on the real world behind the fiction. Anna Wintour’s former assistants have been speaking, and what they have revealed is both more human and more fascinating than anything in the films.
Three of Wintour’s most recent assistants, Sache Taylor, Sammi Tapper and Marley Marius, collectively dubbed by now Head of Editorial Content for American Vogue Chloe Malle, “Anna’s Angels”, sat down to share their experience in The Run-Through with Vogue Podcast. The picture they painted was demanding but not monstrous. There was a 21-page handbook passed down from assistant to assistant. Wintour and her team were always first in the office. When she asked for someone, Marius explained, she wanted them very quickly. Everyone wore heels. The job was a crucible, but also a launching pad, and all three women now hold senior roles at Vogue.
Going further back, the stories get richer. Lauren Weisberger, who worked for Wintour in 1999 and later wrote the novel that became the first film, has said the experience was a year of being yelled at with hours that stretched all day and a lot of the night. Laurie Schechter, one of Wintour’s earliest assistants from the 1980s, describes her former boss as a prickly pear, spiky on the outside, softer within, and mercurial, but someone who has done incredible things for people in the industry. Even Meredith Asplundh, who worked for Wintour in the early 90s, has been candid, famously noting she eventually quit after her thousandth cappuccino run in stilettos.
The real Emily, or at least the woman most strongly suspected of inspiring the character, is believed to be Kate Young, who worked as Wintour’s assistant in 1997 and is now one of Hollywood’s most sought-after celebrity stylists, dressing Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Margot Robbie, among others. The gap between assistant running errands in stilettos and stylist to the A list is, in its own way, the real arc of the film.
What makes all of this feel so alive right now is timing. For women who are in their sixties today, the 1990s were a particular kind of golden age for fashion as genuine culture. Vogue was not competing with Instagram. There were no influencers, no algorithm driven trends, no one going viral in a fast fashion haul. There was the magazine, there was Anna Wintour, and there was a kind of editorial authority that felt almost governmental in its reach.
To be a woman in your thirties or forties during that era, ambitious, interested in the world, perhaps working in media or fashion or just watching from the outside, was to understand instinctively what Miranda Priestly represented. Not a cartoon villain, but something more complicated, a woman who had fought to hold power in an industry that did not make it easy, and who wielded that power in ways that were sometimes devastating and occasionally brilliant.
The sequel, wisely, seems to understand this. Miranda is not being retired. She is being tested. The story of a powerful woman navigating a world that has shifted beneath her feet is, for many women of a certain generation, not just nostalgia, it is recognition.
Whether the film lives up to two decades of anticipation remains to be seen. But the conversation it has already sparked, about what that Vogue era actually was, what it meant to work inside it, and what it cost, is worth every word.
Gird your loins. Miranda is back. And honestly, we have missed her.