The Devil Wears Prada 2 was depressing, actually

Journalists know we won't get Runway's happy ending

When I was offered an internship at British Vogue in 2015, the world of magazine journalism felt expansive and decadent. I’d been warned not to go into journalism by my parents, since they worried I might never move out if I did, but when I received a thick, embossed letter of acceptance in the post from Condé Nast following my interview, then turned up to a gleaming building in Mayfair called ‘Vogue House’, where Condé Nast housed all of its UK titles, it didn’t seem like the kind of industry on the rocks. OK, yes, it was unpaid – Condé Nast reimbursed £25 a week for travel and £25 a week for lunch – and sure, it was kind of preposterous that I shared a desk, computer and chair with another intern, but it still felt like a privilege to be there.

I had, like most women my age, seen The Devil Wears Prada when it came out in 2006, adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel inspired by her 10 months as second assistant for Anna Wintour. I was fascinated by the enigma that was Wintour, whose formidable ambition meant that she predicted she would one day become editor of Vogue when she was still a teenager, and who I would sometimes see briskly marching out of the Wimbledon Village Starbucks during tennis season.

British Vogue under Alexandra Shulman was not known to be as ruthless, yet when I turned up in July after graduating from university, I really did feel like hapless Andy Sachs turning up in a shapeless old cerulean jumper. I distinctly remember feeling sheepish with my white Zara sundress as fashion editors would tinkle over to their desks, bejewelled and sparkling, wearing head-to-toe designer and stilettos. When an editor greeted a free tray of ice-creams – one of the countless freebies delivered to the Condé Nast offices every hour – with a sing-song line “the best snack you can have is a glass of water!” I genuinely wondered if it was dialogue from the film (it wasn’t).

Somewhat mirroring Wintour’s own hierarchical assistant structure – in the film, Andy reports to first assistant Emily, played by Emily Blunt – British Vogue had three interns at once, with staggered start dates. This meant that when I arrived for my first week, I was third in rank: the intern who was starting her third week was in charge, the second her deputy. During my first week, I fetched toast and coffee for editors from the downstairs cafe and sorted their post. By the second, I was allowed to organise clothes loan forms into ringbinders. By the third – feeling frankly despotic with two interns now below me – I was accompanying fashion editors to shoots and was asked to go to Whole Foods to buy Sienna Miller a seabass for a dinner party.

As interns, we stayed late, were shouted at and even had editors phoning us after hours. But, unlike other internships, we were actually given work to do, and genuinely felt useful. Besides, at 22 that melange of terror and frivolity felt quite exciting – and appropriately Vogue. We wanted it to be like the film, so we could tell our friends about it in the pub… and write about it on Substack 11 years later.

After interning at Vogue, I did work experience at Tatler – so posh I was told not to wear trousers – and ended up at GQ, where everyone wore trousers. There we were told to forget about ‘personal brands’ and read the New Yorker cover-to-cover: longform magazine journalism was seen as the ultimate goal. It transformed our writing skills but did little to equip us for a brave new world in which journalism had been replaced by ‘content’ and you were better off nailing your camera lighting than your pitches. Now the lines between influencer culture and journalism are so thin that newspaper editors are creating ‘day in the life’ TikTok videos from the office.

I am not sure how I would have felt, as an aspiring journalist, watching The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which Andy is made redundant from her newspaper to face more lay-offs at Runway Magazine, which is being haggled over by an uncultured tech billionaire keen to erase journalists with AI. The real-world parallels to Condé Nast are dispiriting: the UK offices have lost half of their staff over the last eight years, with mass lay-offs from British GQ a couple of years after I left to move to the Telegraph. A few years ago Glamour ended its print edition, then Pitchfork was folded into GQ. Last year Teen Vogue was folded into Vogue.com, Vogue’s print issues dwindled down to eight a year, and Self magazine shuttered last month. Billionaires really are circling publishers like buyers at a closing-down sale: Jeff Bezos, who recently decimated the Washington Post and sponsored the Met Gala, has been rumoured to want to buy Condé Nast as a gift for his wife Lauren Sánchez – a painfully coincidental subplot in the film, written months before the rumours started.

Despite The Devil Wears Prada 2 essentially being a film about the end of the magazine empire, Vogue has piggy-backed on the film’s marketing campaign to create the kind of cultural moment now essential to brand longevity. Vogue’s May issue saw Streep and Wintour on its cover, and The Devil Wears Prada was even its April Book Club pick, despite having been pilloried by the fashion world when it came out, as I wrote about in more detail for the Telegraph last week.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is silly and fun, yet it was hard not to shudder at the scenes of consultants in Runway’s cafeteria announcing budget cuts to a reduced Miranda Priestly, who had been so invincible in the first. It is notable that of all the careers in the film, Emily Blunt’s executive role at Dior at times feels the most enviable: stable, powerful, lucrative. Of course Runway gets its happy ending, in a way real magazines never will, but even so the whole premise felt too real, and too bleak, for a film banking on feel-good nostalgia. I wanted to see the world of magazines preserved in amber: ludicrous but intact. Instead, I left the cinema feeling a little glum.

Things worth your time this week

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
I inhaled this satirical ‘tradwife thriller’ from Caro Claire Burke, who, when I saw her in conversation with Careless People’s Sarah Wynn-Williams last week, said the idea came from investigating “the grand performance of womanhood”. In the novel, Natalie, a tradwife influencer, wakes up one morning in the year 1855, wondering how she got there. The book then flips between her previous life as an influencer, “performing” idealised domesticity to a Greek chorus of “angry women” on social media, and her bleak new reality of being an actual tradwife, which is notably different to what she’d been cosplaying. But which life is worse? It’s smart, funny, disturbing and, a rare thing for a piece of writing so tied to ‘the zeitgeist’, absolutely worth the hype.

The Life and Times of an American Tween, The New Yorker
An unusually light and positive look at the life of a 12-year-old girl growing up in America, Mira, whom the writer shadows across several weeks as she goes about her day to day. She is bisexual, adheres to a multi-step skincare routine and decries AI. Writer Anna Wiener remains detached and unjudgmental, writing rather beautifully, of Mira’s nightly skincare rituals: “It would be easy, having made it safely past the shores of puberty, to make light of these rituals and ablutions. But the rituals are very important—in fact, they’re everything. They’re experiments with externalizing private self-perceptions, and dalliances with potential selves. They’re a way of projecting into the future: to imagine being noticed, maybe even seen.” Incidentally, Mira also has thoughts on The Devil Wears Prada – largely that Andy should be a “single baddie” rather than chasing a relationship. How times have changed from 2006, when being single was culturally positioned as moral failure. Read the piece here.

The Botox Psyop, Maybe Baby, Substack
A brilliant piece from beauty writer Haley Nahman on how women’s media is normalising and glamourising cosmetic surgery, even while seeking to criticise it. Newman was recently interviewed by a writer for The Cut about how, despite the media’s breathless ‘everyone is getting cosmetic surgery’ narrative, most of the women she knows in real life aren’t. The stats, too, suggest that 96% of women in America aren’t getting botox. And yet, when she read the piece, the angle was that everyone is doing it. As Newman writes, “At what point is “women’s media,” even critical women’s media, incidentally acting as a marketing arm for the cosmetic alteration industry?” As someone heavily invested in the media and celebrity culture because of my job, I am often susceptible to reframing something the 1% are doing as ‘everyone’ – this piece is a helpful reminder to keep popping my online bubble. Read it here.

The Cut’s ‘Losing My Friend Over Wegovy’ essay is an all-timer example of broken editorial ethics, Conquest of the Useless, Substack
The Cut has been master of the click-bait personal essay for several years now, and it works on me every time: I click on their headlines with that usual winning combination of horror and fascination, including on their recent essay from a woman recovering from disordered eating finding out that her friend is taking Wegovy. But Mic Wright’s excellent Substack breaking down what this piece reveals about editors’ ethics made me feel grimy for taking part. Mic writes: “Editors have a duty of care to writers. They also have a responsibility to the people who are subjects in the pieces they publish. The (former) friend at the centre of the essay will recognise herself and have to deal with an awareness of the online commentary about her choices, something prompted only by [the author’s] choice to put them up for debate. She has traded exerting extreme self-control over herself to wanting to have that same control over her friends and the world around her.” Read it here.