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Runway magazine is falling. Miranda is eating in restaurants and on airplanes. Andy is the new editor. Emily is dating a billionaire. Someone dies. Amelia Dimoldenberg makes a cameo. But an unexpected detail in the The Devil Wears Prada 2 What I can’t figure out is this: Andy is worried that she won’t be able to release her eggs.
“I left New York for 15 years, single – I never found the right person, and my children are at the doctor’s office on the 85th,” tells Emily immediately after meeting again after 20 years. “They are eggs,” she explains clearly, adding that she is happy to have children. And at that time, I didn’t ask myself: Was the woman who had worked for “a million girls would kill for” always compatible?
Along with 99% of the other thirty-forty-something journalists at the next London conference last week, I was once a wide-eyed teenager watching the first film and dreaming about Andy’s life. “Everyone wants to be us,” Miranda laughed, and she was right. Impossible boss. Coffee runs. Change of Chanel. Free tours to Paris. Working with the interest of Stanley Tucci. Hell, even a self-indulgent girlfriend who makes the most grilled cheese. We wanted both the highs and the lows, if that meant being successful. After all, we are a generation obsessed with responsibility, chaos and grinding to the point of exhaustion. If an outsider like Andy can break into such a unique business – with black eyebrows and onion bagels – through hard work and creativity, maybe our dreams can come true.
Those companies are now on their knees. “Do you remember when magazines were a thing?” The snarls actress turned killer Emily, who has moved to Dior – the company whose ads are making the runway. Last year, more than 3,000 journalism jobs were advertised in the UK and US. There are only a few places left. Promotion is missing. The budget is always reduced. AI and influencers are replacing everything good. Condé Nast – which the film’s publisher, Elias-Clarke, came from – recently closed down Self magazine after 47 years, when layoffs described as “absolute bloodletting” It was created at the Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos. And there are also problems that have changed significantly in the inaccessible sector: the National Council for the Training of Journalists recently stated that. 80% of journalists they come from primary and secondary education.
What does all this mean for our reporter Andy, then? He’s been breaking award-winning stories for the New York Vanguard newspaper, where he likes to work despite being paid a pittance (his apartment looks like the one he had in the first movie, with a bathtub that spews brown water until you flush it a few times). In a very close moment to his now growing fan base, the paper suddenly closes due to the billionaire. She is offered a modeling job on Runway, which is yet another lucky opportunity, but it doesn’t seem to lessen her work and the challenges in her life. “I just want you to have a decent home,” says his elderly wife Lily, reminding Andy that his salary is now double. “For how long?” Andy answers.
He spends a lot of time in the film trying to save his career at Runway. He said: “I have hope for the future. “I can release an egg!” Yes, egg freezing is a very expensive procedure that does not involve many. But the fact is that the number of women who are doing this has increased, while the number of people giving birth has decreased. When a 43-year-old woman like Andy – who has a middle-class status and a good job – is still too sad to think about starting a family, what does this say?
To be clear, this has nothing to do with Andy’s singleness: lessons have been learned from the relationship disaster of the previous film, the tragic Nate and the high-profile Christian. “Andy had been all over the world and had experiences,” says the screenwriter. Aline Brosh McKenna. I felt like she would have had many boyfriends at this point. Her current love interest – a good architect played by Patrick Brammall – is a beige accessory, who may not be in the film.
This is very satisfying for modern women’s opinion apart from Andy’s work, mainly because Vogue declared it embarrassing to have a boyfriend in a recent viral article. Andy is confident in his marriage, and refuses to settle down before he turns 30 and wait until he’s married before having a baby. It’s another way to convince older DWP2 fans: more women are choosing to be single and financially independent, even if they still live in a country that doesn’t support it.
This is what has happened in the most important years since our millennial youth: the pillars of life have shifted, to personal choice and the lack of external security. We don’t want to “have it all”, but it’s hard to even have options. As Miranda once said, considering her role as a mother, “There is a price.”
Female journalists in film are constantly exploring the unrequited expectations of women. Instead the “career-driven female journalist” is an endearing genre in its own right, with heroines who reflect modern ideals. From 1940, in His Girl Friday, Hildy (Rosalind Russell) is a star newspaper reporter – and the only woman on the staff – whose editor (and her ex-husband, played by Cary Grant) asks her to find out the last thing before she remarries and moves to the countryside. He has a problem so he leaves the quiet life and goes back to work (and is back with the ex – I didn’t say it was perfect). By the 1980s, in When Harry Met Sally, journalist Sally talks candidly about changing her mind about not wanting to have children – a conversation that he still feels brave today. When Julia Roberts’ “two-faced, big-haired foodie” came along in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, we were in a new, established phase for the selfish, jealous woman.
Then Bridget Jones arrived. After her boss and her boyfriend, Daniel (Hugh Grant), seduce her with his partner, Bridget (Renee Zellweger) vows that she will not “give in to the evil man and the parasites of America”, instead she chooses “Chaka Khan and vodka” and quits her publishing job to go into TV reporting. “Nothing can stop me from my dedication to the truth,” he says on his way to address an important civil rights issue, briefly buying a cigarette, a Polo and a pack of Wheat Crunchies.
This causes him to miss, but he was saved by the defense lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and became a national hero, signing a special interview: “This is Bridget Jones too, let’s face it, a little broken now.” Who on earth can see this and no do you want to be a journalist?
Many female journos followed suit: How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days’ Andie (Kate Hudson) uses a man to advance her career; Confessions of a Shopaholic‘s Rebecca (Isla Fisher) struggles with the common but embarrassing issue of credit card debt; and A train stationAmy (Amy Schumer) sleeps, smokes and cringes at the thought of marriage and children – in all the ways that only men do. On the small screen, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was asking all questions are taboo women wanted to answer. Ten years later, aspiring Girls writer Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) announces her GQ advertising job under her belt because, “I think I can be the voice of my generation… a generation.” Of course, Bridget Jones changed their opinion on the strong expectations of people, too: “Tell me, is it four marriages that end in divorce or one in three?” he asks at a wedding party for an adulterous couple.
It’s been 25 years since Bridget Jones’s Diary, and many of the same Devil Wears Prada 2 audiences have been eagerly watching. the fourth film of last year. Sure, she now owns a mansion on Hampstead Heath and a nanny, but the 2025 episode explores the dark realities in new ways: dating in the 50s, crying like a mother and feeling single – even if it’s because your husband is dead.
Return to The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Andy complains about the invitation to the Hamptons. She enters the fashion closet and, carrying a suitcase of designer clothes, boards a coach – a coach! – which leaves him at dinner with the likes of Tina Brown, Jon Batiste and Elias-Clarke’s head. It reminded me of when, while working for a women’s magazine, I was sent on a press trip to the St Moritz hotel where the Kennedys were holidaying, then came home to my three-bed Hackney flatshare to find our kitchen mold.
Magazine reporters are in the sweet spot between wishful thinking and reality, like Titanic’s Jack Dawson dining in first class. It is a wonderful work that brings great joy. But in another 20 years, will such reporters still exist in movies, or indeed, in real life?
The question of a third movie has been heavily discussed by the showrunners during their hectic press tour. “I want it!” says Meryl Streep. But it seems unlikely, given the changing demographics and economic insecurity, that such a succession would be so disappointing. I just hope Andy uses this time to get the eggs. What about the future? Gird your loins.
