It is 20 years, give or take a month, since The Devil Wears Prada unexpectedly barnstormed the summer while embedding a lexicon of indestructible quotes in the collective consciousness. Most sprang from the rigid jaws of Meryl Streep’s unforgiving Miranda Priestly.
“Please bore someone else with your questions.”
“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”
“By all means, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me.”
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Based loosely on Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1988 to 2025, Miranda even managed to nudge the Man of Steel into the wings. Released the same weekend as The Devil Wears Prada, Superman Returns has subsequently drifted into the dingiest of memory holes. That’s the one with Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor. Brandon Routh played Supes. No bells ringing? Well, there you go.
The Devil Wears Prada confirmed Anne Hathaway as a leading player in grown-up movies. It made a star of the then barely known Emily Blunt. It belatedly assured the world Streep could do comedy (something the world should have already known). And it made a case, not least in Streep’s “cerulean sweater” speech, for fashion as culture.
Ten years ago, Hathaway was uncertain about the notion of a follow-up.
“I’m not sure if could is the right question,” she told Variety. “Should there be? I’d love to make a movie with all the people again that’s something totally different. But I think that one might have just hit the right note. It’s good to leave it as it is.”
The industry magazine noted Streep, at that point, had never done a sequel. Two years later, she appeared (albeit briefly) in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Meanwhile, the “legacy sequel” became an increasingly unavoidable beast: Blade Runner 2049, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World, Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Nobody was enormously surprised, therefore, when the key Devil Wears Prada cast members overcame reservations to a follow-up. One can hardly imagine a film better suited to red-carpet promotion. Streep, Hathaway and Blunt are joining Stanley Tucci in London for a good-natured session of backslapping. All four seem plugged into the mains.
It was a very different time when Hathaway, as Andrea, harassed and misused assistant to Miranda, declared independence by flinging her phone into the Concorde fountains in Paris. None of them could have imagined the project would still be part of everyday discourse in 2026.
“The Devil Wears Prada this time would take up from when Andrea threw her phone in the fountain and find out what she’d been up to over 20 years,” Streep, elegant in a grey trouser suit, says. “And find out if she still had her scruples intact about the business. And to put her in a new landscape.
“As I’ve often said, the iPhone was invented the year after we did this. Everything changed. And it’s fun to see these characters in their same personalities and predilections.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 has, indeed, much to say about how the media landscape has changed. The digital invaders were at the gate in 2006, but Miranda, editor of Runway magazine, could still expect most fashion enthusiasts to fork out for the telephone-directory-sized print version of her publication. In the new film, Andrea – “Andy” to all – rejoins Runway as media tycoons circle and job cuts threaten.
You wouldn’t say it’s a political movie (come along, now), but it is alive to what is being lost in the industry. To build on Streep’s argument about the iPhone, it’s startling to think Twitter also arrived a year after Prada’s release. Facebook debuted in 2004 but would barely have registered as a force when the film was being shot. Instagram wasn’t even a glint in its progenitors’ eyes.
Tucci, back as Nigel Kipling, Runway’s art director, relished the challenge to address that evolution – or devolution.
“The fact that it is happening 20 years later is, I think, great, because the world is so different now,” he says. “The world of journalism is very different because of the social media and because of AI and because of certain governments. And the world of fashion is very different.
“So it addresses those issues, and the structure of the film is built around those issues. It deals with these people on a personal level. And I think the timing couldn’t be better.”
Hathaway puts it more forcefully. Aline Brosh McKenna’s script scratched an itch for her.
“She just noticed that the world of fashion, the world of journalism is, it feels, kind of under siege right now,” she says. “Our movie deals with those two worlds. And so the conditions were right to actually bring the two back together. And the timing was right. And Meryl said yes! That’s really what it is.”
Well, quite. The first film did wonders for all involved. Green-lit by 20th Century Fox before Lauren Weisberger had even finished writing the novel on which it’s based, it mined a demographic – skewing female and gay – whose power had just been confirmed by the unstoppable rise of Sex and the City.
Hathaway was charming in the Doris Day role. Blunt made an art of the caustic aside. But the creation that really hit home was Miranda: narrow of eye, rarely raising her voice above a disapproving sigh.
Weisberger really did work as assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue. There was, therefore, endless interest in how that titan of fashion media would take it.
“I had enormous trouble finding anyone in the fashion world who’d talk to me,” McKenna said later. “Because people were afraid of Anna and Vogue, not wanting to be blackballed.”
In 2024, Wintour cryptically told the BBC it was “for the audience and for the people I work with to decide if there are any similarities between me and Miranda Priestly”.
Something like tacit endorsement came earlier this year, when, with the sequel in the offing, Wintour presented at the Oscars alongside Hathaway. She and Streep later teamed up for the cover shot of Vogue’s May edition. Why would she not have a sense of humour about it? The film has done wonders for her profile.
The version in The Devil Wears Prada 2 – now with Kenneth Branagh as romantic partner – seems that bit more vulnerable than the iron lady of the opening skirmish.
“I think probably what I liked about it is that this Miranda, who is defined by her power, not her scruples, is suddenly having to navigate a world where she’s in danger of losing the control that she so tightly holds,” Streep says.
“And I think part of what I loved about the first film was that you got a glimpse of the fact that she does love what she does, that her attachment is not just to be in charge. It’s being in charge of a quest for beauty and a celebration of the best in human accomplishments. And she fosters that.”
There is, indeed, something here about how the rapidly changing technological environment can constrain even the mightiest of media deities. Nobody trained the boomer generation in how to counteract a negative screed on TikTok.
“She has a feeling that she’s a curator of culture,” Streep says. “To keep that going financially, she takes a lot of pride in it. And as the bolts fall out of the ship, and she feels it’s in danger, she has to c ... c ... c ... compromise. Ha ha. Which is a word that comes hard to her. It is difficult to say. She comes to realise how much she relies on people who have supported her.
“I like all those realisations. I don’t think she comes down from a pedestal of mean. She’s plenty mean and efficient in what she does. But I like the evolution.”
The Devil Wears Prada is, of course, also about the look and the buzz. This episode throngs with celebrity cameos, including one from Rory McIlroy and his wife, Erica (though not from Wintour). The clothes are fabulous. The helicopter shots of Manhattan and Milan are plentiful. Movies have, among other things, always been there to show us stuff we can’t have.
“It’s like candy for people. It’s heaven,” Blunt says of the elaborate montages.
Hathaway pressed David Frankel, the director, into lavishing attention on those sequences.
“We realised it was going to be hard to surprise people, because so many of the costumes, which is a huge part of the pleasure of this film, were online and being dissected already,” she says. “And so all I did was I went to David and I said, ‘I just think that we have this opportunity to go to Milan. And I just feel like, if this was a movie about boys’ stuff, this would be like the big explosion sequence. And we need our version of that.’”
The downside to all this is that, throughout the shoot, snappers were eager to get shots of the latest addition to the Devil Wears Prada wardrobe. Even the grand dame herself was snapped unawares.
“The thing about the online reviews of the costumes before they come out was that they reviewed a bathrobe of mine,” Streep says. “I came out of the trailer, you know, so I wouldn’t spill the pizza on the nice clothes.”
The indignity.
“They called it a dust coat, and it was a dressing gown. So brilliant.” Blunt says.
“My personal clothes started getting reviewed,” Hathaway adds “I was just walking to hair and make-up and people were, like, ‘Andy in a jean skirt!’ I’m, like, ‘It’s just mine.’ I got a white mechanic suit. And I just wore that for the rest of filming. Ha ha.”
I guess they don’t get to keep any of the characters’ clothes. None of this stuff comes cheap.
“I have one suit,” Tucci says. “When we did the fashion shoot. A Dolce & Gabbana suit.”
“I did keep my Uggs, because those were the friendliest faces I met at the end of the day – scuzzy inside,” Streep says with a laugh.
You do get the impression they are genuinely enjoying this batch of promotional duties. It is not always fun pressing the flesh and battling along a red carpet lined by yelling media oiks. But there is a sense of camaraderie here. They pulled off an unlikely heist two decades ago, and now they are back for a second run.
As we are drawing to a close, someone asks where they see their characters in 20 years’ time. This is not the same question for the septuagenarian Streep or the sexagenarian Tucci as it is for Blunt or Hathaway.
“Ask the other two,” Tucci says in good humour.
“In ‘another room’, so to speak,” Streep adds, also smiling.
“We are going to have a girls’ trip,” Blunt says.
“Are you going to come to where we’re buried?” Tucci asks.
“Yeah, we’re going to come to where you’re buried, lay flowers and pay our respects.”
Everyone is cackling, which reflects well on them.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in cinemas from Friday, May 1st
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