The Devil Wears Prada Is a Broken Promise to Millennials
The Devil Wears Prada Is a Broken Promise to Millennials
Louis StaplesFri, May 1, 2026 at 2:35 PM UTC
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“The Devil Wears Prada” and the Hustle MythEverett
The Devil Wears Prada 2 begins in much the same way as the 2006 film. We see Andy Sachs, now twenty years into her journalism career, hurriedly getting ready for work before doing what she does best—crossing a New York street. Moments later, she gets a major shock when she’s laid off from the paper where she works as an award-winning reporter. And soon, through a sequence of unexpected events, she’s back where she belongs: in Miranda Priestly’s office, on the receiving end of that withering stare.
The original Devil Wears Prada movie is a foundational Millennial text—a film that is as visually iconic as it is endlessly quotable. It wasn’t just a love letter to the fashion industry, where a collection of Oscar de la Renta gowns can popularize the now-unmistakable tone of cerulean blue, but to the concept of work itself. Released shortly before two seismic moments—the first iPhone in 2007 and the 2008 financial crash—the movie encapsulated (and glamorized) what became the mainstream Millennial attitude toward work: “Hustle culture,” self-optimization, making your job your life. And as we revisit Miranda and Andy’s world, it tells a wider story that spans far beyond fashion and the struggles of print media, where generational promises that were made to Millennials—about what we can expect from our working lives—have been broken.
Back in 2006, the movie was marketed as a classic rom-com, but the most love-hate relationships were between the characters and their jobs. We meet Andy and her friends at the start of their careers, where a rite-of-passage is working a job at the bottom of the ladder because it will be a stepping stone to something better. Andy is very transparent about the fact that she only took the assistant job at Runway—the job “a million girls would kill for,” where she’s not even allowed to leave her desk to pee—in order to become a “serious” journalist. The core conflict of the first film is her ambition versus the demands of her personal relationships—with her parents, her friends, and her (whiney) boyfriend, Nate.
Rather than critique this work-life balance, the movie glamorizes it as a necessary step toward success. Midway through the film, Andy tells her mentor Nigel: “My personal life is hanging by a thread.” His response? “Join the club. That’s what happens when you start doing well at work. Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. That means it’s time for a promotion.” Even Miranda, who can end careers with a purse of her lips, isn’t free from these dynamics. In the film’s final act, when her marriage falls apart, it’s presented as a necessary sacrifice—a reason why she is the greatest to ever do it.
As the generation who entered the workforce at the precise intersection of the digital revolution and the financial crash, Millennial culture has long been anchored around work and self-promotion. In the mid-2010s, when I was at university, I distinctly remember feeling a peripheral pressure to financially optimize my life, and have a “side-hustle” before I’d even graduated. (I even did my requisite stint as an unpaid fashion intern one summer, delivering sushi orders to bosses who, like Miranda, didn’t know my name.) In the Instagram infographic era, Millennial culture was all about how to “love your job” so much that you “never have to work a day in your life!” And I’m not saying that we invented the concept of having a fulfilling career or working hard, but this was a departure from my parents’ generation, most of whom viewed work primarily as a way of earning money. For online and image-conscious Millennials, our jobs became an identity.
This type of GirlBossery is at the heart of the original Devil Wears Prada. Emily, Miranda’s highly-strung and impeccably-dressed “first” assistant, is driven by the status of working at Runway, to the point where she sits at her desk constantly on the edge of burnout, muttering to herself: “I love my job, I love my job…” And instead of the classic 2000s rom-com happy ending, the film’s conclusion is all about career success. Miranda survives at the helm of Runway, while Andy's master-plan pans out when she uses her stint as her assistant to get into “serious” newspaper journalism. All the strife—the fallouts with friends, the missed birthdays, the breakup with Nate—was worth it to be on the right career path.
The sequel once again asks that question—and this time, we get a more complicated answer. Embedded within the arc of the first movie is a promise: That if, like Andy, you work your ass off at the grueling assistant job and climb the ladder, then one day you’ll get to be “the Miranda.” Not the all-powerful editor of a fashion magazine, necessarily, but the person who makes decisions—the one who is ordering the “piping hot” Starbucks, not running to get it. In the opening scenes of the sequel, however, we see that this promise is yet to be delivered. When Andy and all her colleagues are laid off, she tells her best friend: “Everyone I know is going through this: layoffs, downsizing, consolidations.”
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This goes far beyond the media industry. Despite the opportunities of the digital age, Millennials are the first generation in history to earn less than our parents. In the U.K., where I’m from, a third of men in their thirties still live at home. And on both sides of the Atlantic, there is a shared reality that, as a generation, we’re having to wait much longer to hit the same life milestones. Experiences that we thought we’d have grown out of by now—getting evicted by a landlord, finding ourselves suddenly unemployed, or not being able to afford to live alone even when you are employed—are still pressing concerns. Many of us are putting off having kids—like Andy, who has frozen her embryos—because it’s difficult to make any long-term commitments when you don’t know if your job will even exist in a few years.
In The Devil Wears Prada 2, Andy’s friends exemplify this stagnation. Like her, they are no longer working at the bottom of the ladder, but they still feel unfulfilled and frustrated. (One of them is editing a “memoir” by one of Paris Hilton’s chihuahuas.) Emily, now a high-powered fashion executive, is the only person in Andy’s orbit to have significantly increased her status—and that’s mostly because her boyfriend is one of Gen X’s world-famous tech billionaires who, of course, loves AI.
At the most basic level, it’s pretty telling that, when Andy returns to Runway, she is still working under the exact same people. Sure, Miranda is a notably diminished figure who is now flying coach and (gasp) hanging up her own coats, who seems to have some idea that there are things she isn’t allowed to say. Runway once had eye-watering budgets for photoshoots, but now Nigel is “lucky if he gets two days to shoot content that people scroll past as they pee.” As an editor, Andy has a (literal) seat at the table of Miranda’s luxurious Hamptons home, yet she is still jumping through hoops to impress her. Really, as a journalist whose apartment walls are covered in award certificates, she should be at the level where she’s challenging someone like Miranda, like Jacqueline Follet in the first movie. Instead, she’s still scurrying around after her and being told: “You did not earn this job.”
The sequel is endlessly referential to its first installment. From the soundtrack to the quotes, to the costumes, and Stanley Tucci’s perfectly delivered pep-talks and side-eyes, there are countless moments for the most detail-conscious fans. Except, two decades on, these references are a reminder of how much has changed. As Millennials have watched the optimism of the Obama-era fade into a much harsher economic reality, it’s not surprising that, during the pandemic, many of my friends started rethinking their attitude toward work, or that Gen Z seems to reject “hustle culture” and prioritize a different work-life balance. In this economy? Burning yourself out no longer feels worth it, even for a job you love.
This vibe-shift definitely hasn’t reached Andy or Miranda. In one of the most referential scenes, the duo ride in a car together, and Miranda reminds Andy that she’s always one step ahead. But this time, she’s noticeably more conciliatory than when she famously said “Everybody wants to be us.” Instead, she talks about the human cost of her career, like how much of her kids’ lives she’s missed, before concluding it’s all worth it. “I love working,” she says. “I really do.”
Once again, that very love of work—the trait Miranda and Andy have always shared—is where their story ends. In the final shot, we see Andy working late with a coffee in-hand, wearing a certain sweater that observant fans will recognize. The major difference between these workaholics is that Miranda’s career made her rich, respected, and powerful. But for many of Andy’s generation, who started out fetching the coffee and have worked tirelessly ever since, theirs are still moving at a glacial pace. A raw deal? For Millennials? Groundbreaking.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
