There is a scene early in The Devil Wears Prada 2 in which Andy Sachs, two decades older and now a respected reporter, learns that her entire newsroom has been laid off. She learns it by text. She is at an awards gala when the message arrives. The film cuts to her face, then to her phone, then back to the room, where everyone is still clapping. It is a small, devastating beat, and it is the closest the movie comes to admitting what year it is.
The film opened on May 1 and, according to industry trackers, had grossed $445 million worldwide by May 13. It is, by every commercial measure, a hit. It is also a fantasy about saving a fashion magazine, released into a month in which the company that publishes the real-world equivalents of Runway shuttered one of its longest-running titles, replaced an editor-in-chief at another, and cut sixteen more union members across the building. The movie and the moment did not arrive separately. They arrived as the same news cycle, told in two registers.
On April 16, Condé Nast announced it would close Self, a forty-seven-year-old health and fitness title that had been online-only since 2017. Wellness coverage will be folded into Allure and Glamour. The same announcement wound down the Glamour print editions in Germany, Spain, and Mexico, and shut Wired’s Italian edition. The company estimated the global head count loss at roughly 300 positions. On April 22, the Condé Nast union confirmed that sixteen additional staffers had been laid off at Glamour, Self, and Condé Nast Entertainment, bringing total union losses to thirty-three in five months. Within days, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, Samantha Barry, announced her departure.
The plot, and the room it played in
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not, at its surface, about layoffs. Its surface is what the first film’s surface was — clothes, ambition, Meryl Streep’s implacable face, a printer’s drawer of cameos from designers and editors playing themselves. Anna Wintour is in it. So is the cover of December’s Vogue. The actual plot, though, is structurally a magazine-rescue drama. Runway has run a glowing profile of a fast-fashion brand called Speed Fash that turns out to be propaganda for sweatshop labor. Miranda Priestly, the editor, is under pressure from a corporate boss who wants to install a friendlier editor and gut the masthead. Andy is brought back in as features editor, against Miranda’s will, to help the magazine claw back its credibility. The film’s third act is a fight over who buys Elias-Clarke, the parent company. A sympathetic outside billionaire wins. The masthead is saved. Everyone keeps their jobs.
The fantasy is in the ending, but it is also in the conflict. The thing that almost kills Runway, in the film, is a single editorial failure — one badly vetted puff piece. The thing actually killing the magazines the film is gesturing at is not a single editorial failure. It is the slow withdrawal of the advertising base that funded glossy print for sixty years, the migration of fashion discovery to platforms the publishers do not own, and a corporate parent that has been told by its investors to extract margin from a shrinking line item. The film treats the magazine business as a credibility problem solvable by a better proprietor. The actual business is treating it as a portfolio problem solvable by closures.
The film treats the magazine business as a credibility problem solvable by a better proprietor. The actual business is treating it as a portfolio problem solvable by closures. — The editors
None of this is the movie’s fault. A studio comedy is not obligated to be a financial filing. But the opening-weekend audience for The Devil Wears Prada 2 includes the people whose jobs the closing weekend of April just eliminated, and the people whose jobs the next round will, and that audience is reading the fantasy ending against a real ledger. Critics noticed. NPR’s review headlined that this time, the devil is cutting jobs. Time, in a positive notice, called the film bracingly honest about the state of magazines and fashion today. Slate described the ending as fantastical, set against a bleak reminder of our reality. Praising the film and noting its impossibility have become the same gesture.
The numbers the movie does not put on screen
The U.K.’s Audit Bureau of Circulation, the closest thing magazine publishing has to a public scoreboard, captured the directional story in its 2024 figures, released earlier this year. British Vogue’s circulation fell five percent year-on-year, to 180,036. GQ U.K. fell from 85,090 to 72,058. Tatler dropped eight percent. Vanity Fair dropped fourteen. Hearst’s U.K. portfolio, by contrast, grew two percent across its titles in the same window, and grew digital subscriptions twenty-five percent. The publishers are in the same business in name only. One is contracting the print footprint and reducing head count; the other is selectively trading print scale for paid digital and posting growth on the digital line.
The Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, in remarks to Semafor on the day of the Self announcement, said there were no plans to shut down further magazine brands. The union, in the statement following the April 22 cuts, characterized the wave of reductions as ongoing. Both can be true. The body count is the same either way.
Why the movie still matters
It would be easy, and slightly cheap, to write that the film is simply out of touch — a glamorous lie sold to people whose industry is being dismantled. That is not quite what is on screen. The Devil Wears Prada 2 keeps acknowledging what year it is, in small ways. The layoff-by-text scene. A subplot in which a marketing executive talks about engagement metrics with the air of a man who has just discovered that talent is now downstream of analytics. The casting of cameos from working editors who, in real life, are watching their masthead pages thin. The film is not pretending the crisis is not there. It is choosing to write its way out of the crisis, the way studio comedies have always written their way out of crises — by finding a deus ex with a checkbook.
What that does for the audience is more interesting than what it does for the film. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is operating as a kind of public catharsis for a specific professional class: the editors, writers, photographers, stylists, and fashion-adjacent workers who built the glossy-print economy and are now watching it close in slow motion. The fantasy of a benevolent buyer who lets the masthead operate on its own terms is, structurally, the same fantasy that the union bargaining table is trying to negotiate, with much less bargaining power and much worse lighting. The movie is not selling a lie. It is selling a wish, to a room that knows it is a wish, and laughing with the room while it does.
What the artifact tells you about the moment
There is a way of writing about pop culture that treats a sequel like The Devil Wears Prada 2 as a frivolous object, separable from the harder business news around it. That separation does not hold up here. The film is a $445 million event about a magazine in trouble, playing on screens during the same forty-five-day window in which a forty-seven-year-old American magazine was closed, an editor-in-chief stepped down, and an entire union’s worth of editorial workers lost their jobs. The audience for the film is also, in significant part, the workforce of the crisis the film is dramatizing. The text on the phone in the gala scene is sent from inside the building.
The cultural current the artifact surfaces is not a generational shift or a taste swing. It is something narrower and more specific. A creative industry whose institutions are visibly contracting is producing, for itself, the story of its rescue. That is a familiar pattern in American media. The 1940s newsroom comedies that idealized the city desk came out as the city desk was being thinned. The early-2000s prestige dramas about cable TV came out as the cable model was about to be eaten. A genre that flatters an industry tends to arrive at the moment when the industry needs flattering most. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is on time, in that respect. Whether what it flatters survives long enough to make a third one is the open question, and the question the film’s ending is too gentle to answer.