Twenty years have gone by; the fashion and publishing worlds have changed but Satan’s clothing and accessory choices are pretty much what they were. It’s time for a sprightly and amiable sequel to the adored mid-00s Manhattan romcom that followed the adventures of would-be serious writer and saucer-eyed ingenue Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway. Straight out of college in one of the flyover states, she fluked a job at iconic New York fashion magazine Runway, edited by the terrifying and amusingly surnamed Miranda Priestly, played of course by Meryl Streep. Miranda doesn’t look a day older in the sequel, and nor does Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, still in post as her loyal, worldly, privately melancholy second-in-command.
So Andy has come back, having been laid off by some Jeff Bezos-type meanie from the upmarket broadsheet where she’d been winning awards for super-serious but boring articles. She can’t afford to turn down a mephistophelean offer to be features editor for Runway, where she finds things are very different. The magazine now has nothing like the colossal budgets of old; embarrassingly, it has to distance itself from the sweatshop economy, and is ground down by chasing clicks and eyeballs in a fickle digital world ruled by a teen customer base with no class and no taste. Miranda has to pay pursed lip-service to body positivity and rejecting heteronormativity in the workplace, and gets schooled in correct language by her new assistant Amari (Simone Ashley). She even has to fly coach.
This follow-up is fun, though let down by Andy’s bafflingly dreary and chemistry-free romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate (a tepid role for Patrick Brammall from TV’s Colin from Accounts). Miranda’s latest submissive prince-consort boyfriend is played by Kenneth Branagh, bizarrely the lead violinist in a string quartet. The film also gives us a lot of star-fan cameos – this is usually a bad sign, but managed well enough here. Not the big cameo though, not the one they were surely chasing, the white whale of cameos: Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor on whom Priestly is modelled.
In fact, the hauteur prerogative has passed on to Andy’s old nemesis, the ice queen of aspirational couture and Miranda’s former top assistant Emily, who is now the head of Dior, calling the shots and making the shrewd point that ultra-luxury brands for the 0.1% are recession-proof. She is played once again with style and plenty of nice lines by Emily Blunt.
It is a pleasure to see (most of) the old gang back, including screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and director David Frankel. (I groan at the grumpy and obtuse response I had to the first film, before watching it again on TV and epiphanically realising how great it is.) It’s very funny when Miranda hasn’t the smallest memory of who Andy is. Or has she? Justin Theroux is amusing as Emily’s grinningly daft-yet-sinister plutocrat boyfriend Benji.
The movie takes us through new versions of the beats from the first film: Andy dishing with Nigel in the cafeteria; Nigel picking out something for the ungrateful Andy to wear, this time for a trip to Miranda’s place in the Hamptons; Andy going to a fashion mecca (Milan); Andy frantically engaging in backstairs shenanigans to protect Miranda from some wicked corporate coup. And for the DWP connoisseurs, there’s even an outing for Andy’s awful blue polyblend sweater that Nigel found to be such a windup back in the day. This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.
