(WARNING: Spoilers ahead!)
Walking into The Devil Wears Prada 2, I expected some nods to the existential changes that both media and fashion have endured in the twenty years since the original film was released. I expected beautiful things, beautiful people and beautiful sets shot in beautiful cinematic fashion.
What I did not expect was a film centrally concerned with one of the defining questions of our moment: in the age of AI, what do beauty, artistry, and human achievement mean?
In the film’s central scene, Runway hosts a Milan Fashion Week client dinner in the refectory of the Convent of the Santa Maria delle Grazie, the home of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper. It’s a fitting setting. This dinner is also a kind of “Last Supper” for Runway as we know it, as the publication is about to be acquired by tech billionaire Benji Barnes as a trophy gift for his trophy girlfriend, Emily Charlton.
Miranda Priestly, still Runway’s Editor-in-Chief, uses the dinner as an opportunity to discuss the future of the publication with Benji, who is among the guests. She pleads that some Runway traditions be allowed to remain, most importantly, “a commitment to beauty, artistry, the best in human achievement.”
Benji makes no commitments but regards the plea with noticeable flippancy, responding, “So tradition, huh? I think the day is coming, perhaps very soon, where Runway won’t need models or locations or even designers. It’ll all just, you know, be AI.”
Content v. Culture: The Cost of Excellence
This exchange might seem to be about technology, but it’s really about culture. Benji’s remark reduces Runway’s photographs and the fashion they present to a set of outputs indistinguishable from content, and in so doing, he separates the beauty and creativity of cultural artifacts from the human labor and imagination required to produce them.
Setting this conversation in the shadow of Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper – one of the greatest testaments to beauty, artistry, and human achievement in the Western world – suggests to us that Benji might be missing something.
Leonardo Da Vinci. The Last Supper.
We first encounter The Last Supper in an earlier scene. Miranda and Andy Sachs, newly returning to Runway as the features editor, find themselves face-to-face with the mural, and Miranda, as versed in art history as in fashion, points out that Jesus is depicted here without a halo. This is a departure from tradition, Miranda notes, and offers the interpretation that it’s perhaps Leonardo’s way of saying, “We are human. No one is perfect. Humans are at once glorious and fallible, and inevitably we deceive and betray one another. We let each other down. It’s what we’re built to do.”
This dichotomy between human gloriousness, always on full display in The Devil Wears Prada universe, and fallibility is a central theme from the very beginning of the film. The opening mise-en-scène involves a Runway scandal where the publication lauds a brand aptly called Speed Fash that turns out to be a sweatshop, triggering Andy’s invitation to return to the publication.
At the other end of the film, one of the final scenes shows Andy and Emily meeting for lunch, where Emily, hoping for Andy’s friendship, acknowledges that she screwed up in her scheming and made herself, for all intents and purposes, persona non grata in the fashion industry. Andy forgives her and agrees to be friends anyway, saying, “Everyone screws up.”
That’s the point, really. It’s because everyone screws up – because we’re all so very fallible and limited – that we stand in awe of excellence in beauty, artistry and human achievement. The Last Supper mural or a Dior gown becomes sublime not simply because it is beautiful, but because another human being, as clumsy and faltering as any of us, brought it into existence at all.
The Last Supper mural or a Dior gown is sublime because another human being, as clumsy and faltering as any of us, brought it into existence at all. The hours of practice, the sacrifice of focus, and the endurance of repeated failure are so much of what makes culture, indeed the full range of human achievement, valuable and meaningful.
The achievement goes beyond the artifact itself to the profoundly human process of bringing it into being. The hours of practice, the sacrifice of focus, and the endurance of repeated failure are so much of what makes culture, indeed the full range of human achievement, valuable and meaningful. That’s why Miranda, giving Andy permission to write her tell-all biography, tells her, “You should keep all the juicy bits in: how impatient I am and demanding and imperious and, you know, how much of my children’s lives I’ve missed, and just put it all in there because people should know. They should know there’s a cost.” It’s the cost that makes the work an achievement, the excellence awesome, and the endeavor valuable.
Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci as Andy Sachs, Miranda Priestly and Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Credit: 20th Century Studios.
That’s the tradition that Runway and Miranda represent as much as Da Vinci: not perfection, but the stubborn, difficult and profoundly human pursuit of excellence anyway. If Runway all just turns into AI, as Benji predicts, it flattens into content – disposable, even corrosive, rather than valuable. That is not to say that AI cannot be used to produce culture, but to substitute it for the work itself is to lose what gives it its value and significance.
Pompeii and the Seduction of Inevitability
Returning to the Miranda-Benji dinner discussion, Benji summarizes his general philosophy toward change and the future. In a dose of truly horrifying fatalism delivered with a laugh, Benji asserts, “The world is about change. That’s what human beings don’t understand. The future just comes rushing at us like, um, well, like the lava of Pompeii. And our job is to just let it take what it wants to take, you know? One day it’s gonna come, and it’s gonna smother us all. Maybe that’s the way it has to be.”
Benji’s words may come as a pronouncement, but they are really an abdication. He encourages Miranda, indeed all of us, to treat the future as though it were a natural disaster: inevitable, impersonal, and beyond human control. But this AI-led future is not nature. It’s man-made. The technology is man-made. How it is deployed, who benefits from it, and what it is allowed to replace are all human decisions. The more that we accept passivity, the more we become like the citizens of Pompeii: frozen in place while others shape the world around us.
Four Individuals from the House of a Golden Bangle. Archaeological Park of Pompeii.
This wave of change might feel different because it is so otherworldly and because we’ve imagined it in one form or another for decades through science-fiction books and movies as much as through recent media coverage. But in its essence, it is no different than previous technological revolutions: systems built by people, controlled by people, and leveraged by concentrated centers of money and power. It is also strikingly similar to the same corporate mechanics that downsize and consolidate business operations to boost shareholder value – the very same dynamics that help to bring Andy Sachs, now an award-winning journalist in her own right, back to Runway and that have been eroding Runway and all of the media ecosystem in the twenty years since the release of the original film.
We’ve seen the cost of inaction, the film seems to say. We are living with it today. Are we willing to pay that price again, perhaps even more greatly this time?
From Mural to Miranda: Tradition and Stewardship as the Engine of Culture
In response to Benji’s statements, Miranda, ever one to hold her cards close to her chest, replies, “Maybe,” and walks out of the hall, under the gaze of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Aside from the obvious thematic parallel, The Last Supper suggests another way of thinking about things.
The Last Supper is without question one of the most important works of art in the Western world. It is also one of the most delicate. In addition to the mismatch between, on the one hand, the room’s moisture-prone construction and humid environment and, on the other, the materials used to create the mural, The Last Supper also bore significant damage over the centuries from kitchen and candle smoke and flooding, and it faced wartime threats from Napoleon and World War II. It has survived only through great care by one generation after another for more than 500 years. It is a testament to beauty, artistry and human achievement as much as it is to tradition and stewardship, which are really just fancy terms for continued collaborative action by many people over time.
So is Runway. It ought to be absurd to draw a parallel between a Da Vinci masterpiece and a fashion publication, and yet in the values they embody and the continued commitment they require, they are two manifestations of the same ethos and instincts. Placed in the context of this discussion between Miranda and Benji, itself a reflection of one of the most fundamental questions of our era, this parallel is actually vital.
As such, The Devil Wears Prada 2 represents Miranda Priestly less as a “Dragon Lady” or fearsome Olympic goddess and more as Runway’s chief steward. She is no longer controlling everything in the room and bending everyone to her will, but forming partnerships, sharing the spotlight, and assembling a community. It is still all in service of the publication, as it has always been, but we see her take her place in something much bigger than herself.
Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly at the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II, Milan, in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Credit: 20th Century Studios.
Likewise, we see Runway take its place in something much bigger than just fashion or media. The film boasts a long list of cameos that seems at first like a gratuitous who’s-who of celebrities: Donatella Versace, Heidi Klum, Marc Jacobs, Ashley Graham, Winnie Harlow, Kara Swisher, Tina Brown, Jenna Bush Hager, Jon Batiste, Suleika Jouad, Karl-Anthony Towns, Ronny Chieng, and the list goes on. What this list really represents, though, is the community that sustains Runway in much the same way as the publication sustains them, with connections spanning fashion, media, music, literature, sports and comedy. In appearing in this film, they become participants in a shared commitment to uphold and recognize and reward human achievement.
The community convenes in grand form with Lady Gaga leading the way at the Pinacoteca di Brera fashion show extravaganza. A procession in full regalia followed by Runway’s publicly declared commitment to its values, this event renews the covenant that Runway makes with culture and with humanity. Here and throughout the film, Runway becomes not merely a fashion publication, but a symbolic defense of cultivated human taste, artistic labor, and the belief that culture is more than content.
The cameos are also, in some sense, a gathering in defense of human excellence itself, and the film is a declaration: beauty, artistry and cultivated human achievement are still worth protecting, perhaps now more than ever. Culture is creativity and community, and it remains, ultimately, a human artifact and a human choice.
Elizabeth Groch is the Founder & CEO of The Roguery.