Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci in 'The Devil Wears Prada 2.' 20th Century Studios
(UPDATED) In 2001, ABS-CBN News Digital EIC Dan Mariano gathered the News Online staff of nearly 30 people and announced that there would be job cuts. “If you have any job openings you want to apply for, better do it now,” he told the entire team. And then he announced the date the layoffs would finally come down.
I was not in the newsroom when it happened. At the time, I was on assignment nearly 200 km away from Metro Manila, chronicling the lives of Mangyans near a mountain in Calapan, Oriental Mindoro.
Before I had left, an editor told me: “If you have no access to your company email when you get back, that’s when you know that you didn’t make the cut.”
For 3 days, in a place with no cellphone signal, I was working on a story not knowing if it was my last one, not knowing if I had a job waiting for me back home. When I finally did get back, I went straight to the office before midnight, logged in and for one heart-stopping minute completely forgot my password until my nerve-wracked brain finally coughed it up and found that my job was safe for now.
Nearly half the News Online staff did not make the cut.
Watching "The Devil Wears Prada 2” this week reminded me of all that, as well as other subsequent upheavals in ABS-CBN since including the devastating non-renewal of the franchise in 2020.
“Prada 2” starts off with layoffs -- an entire newsroom staff getting pink-slipped on the same night that they received awards. For the casuals, that’s a story beat; for a journalist, that’s a trigger warning or even worse, a horror story. For a guy who liked but did not love ‘Prada 1”, this movie had me hooked in just one scene. The next hour had me reeling -- a fashion flick about the slow death of journalism? I didn’t think I signed up for the sequel of "Civil War" but here we are.
Because here’s the thing about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” It’s not really about fashion per se. There are no monologues about blue vs cerulean jackets. This one is tackling something else entirely.
In that first scene, Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway), now a respected reporter for the New York Vanguard, is set to receive an award when she and her entire newsroom are laid off via text. She then delivers an impassioned speech about the importance of journalism, not knowing that the end of this particular job is going to lead her back to an overtly demanding, very familiar boss.
Andy’s awards rant lands her back in Runway and the Devil herself, an older but not necessarily nicer Miranda Priestly who promptly fires the former features editor after Andy gets the job. “I hear she was first in her family to go to college,” Miranda explains, showing that 20 years has not softened that edge. And we’re off with the insults.
Andy’s hiring comes immediately after Runway and Miranda are savaged online for publishing a puff piece about a brand that uses sweatshop labor. While Andy does soften the blow for Runway with her very first piece, the need to “move the needle” in terms of clicks pushes her to look for even more exclusives including an interview with a tech bro’s reclusive ex-wife. Runway’s success is important for Miranda who has been waiting for her boss, Elias-Clarke CEO Irv Ravitz’s approval of her promotion as head of global content. Andy’s determination -- remember how she bagged a copy of an unpublished Harry Potter book -- gives Miranda an edge but fate has other plans for Runway.
There are several more twists and turns in "Prada 2" that I didn’t see coming, which are better experienced than read. The quartet of Miranda, Nigel, Andy and Emily are like seeing old friends who love you but will also give you the meanest insults, such as pretending they don’t remember you or accusing you of shopping at TJ Maxx. Older, however, also means wiser and better with Miranda still remaining a fashion powerhouse, Andy as a more seasoned reporter, Nigel as Miranda’s strong right-arm, and Emily holding her own as senior executive of Dior.
Some of the fashion choices will definitely turn heads, with nods to Annie Hall and feminine meanswear, a firehouse Balenciaga gown that would make the devil proud, and a Dries Van Noten tassel jacket that looks both trash and treasure in equal parts.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” doesn’t focus on just the characters though or what they’re wearing but on something bigger, the raison d'être of the first movie --- Runway, the magazine, as the gatekeeper of glam, the final word on the fashion universe and how it has slowly succumbed to time and entropy, and the ravages of commerce in the last 20 years.
“Remember when magazines were a thing?” says Emily Blunt’s character, Emily Charlton, now a senior exec in Dior to -- of all people -- her former boss as Miranda seeks to retain Dior’s ad budget. If the first "Prada" movie was about Anna Wintour and the heights of Vogue, "Prada 2" would be its nadir -- as fashion magazines fall into irrelevance from the flood of a billion TikToks.
Strip away the accoutrements, and "Prada 2" is looking for something deeper -- the importance of vision and why journalism still matters in a world more interested in virality, clicks or the bottomline. It’s about why some things are worth saving because not doing so means that the vendors take over.
Throughout the movie, Miranda is forced to endure a myriad of checks and humiliations -- budget cuts, economy seats, Uber rides, cancel culture, betrayal and even the death of relationships. And yet she never breaks because her belief in her vision is undaunted. And sometimes, to keep that vision, you have to keep working. “And I dearly love working,” she tells Andy at a crucial moment.
Well said, Miranda. Well said.