There’s to be a follow-up to the film The Devil Wears Prada, with original screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, “in talks” to provide the script. The 2006 comedy, starring Anne Hathaway as Andy, the put-upon assistant to Meryl Streep’s glacial New York fashion magazine editor, Miranda Priestly, was an enormous global hit (taking $327m at the box office). As well as the planned sequel, there’s a stage musical opening at the Dominion theatre in London’s West End at the end of this month, starring Vanessa Williams as Priestly, with music by Elton John. Almost two decades after the original, it appears the franchise has been reawakened, but so too have the problematic issues surrounding it.
The first point to be made about The Devil Wears Prada is that it was, to employ fashion vernacular, fabulous, darling! Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, a thinly disguised account of her time working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at US Vogue, it was a genuinely witty film about fashion which, save for Ben Stiller’s sublime Zoolander, are surprisingly rare. Curiously, for an industry teeming with big characters, cinematic takes have tended towards the laboured (Robert Altman’s 1994 Prêt-à-Porter), the misfiring (2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic) and the downright dreary (Daniel Day-Lewis’s designer moping about like he’d swallowed a pin cushion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018).
