Runway magazine is collapsing. Miranda is eating in the cafeteria and flying economy. Andy is the new features editor. Emily is dating a billionaire. Somebody dies. Amelia Dimoldenberg makes a cameo. But the one unexpected detail in The Devil Wears Prada 2 that I can’t stop thinking about is this: Andy worries that she’ll never be in a position to unfreeze her eggs.
“Left New York for 15 years, not married – never found the right person, and my kids are at a doctor’s office on 85th,” she breezily reports to Emily when they reunite after 20 years. “They’re eggs,” she clarifies, adding that she is excited to have children. And in that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder: was the woman who once had the job “a million girls would kill for” always this relatable?
Along with 99% of the other thirty- and forty-something journalists at the sequel’s London premiere last week, I was once a wide-eyed teenager watching the first film and dreaming of Andy’s life. “Everybody wants to be us,” Miranda smirked, and she was right. The impossible boss. The coffee runs. The Chanel makeover. The free trips to Paris. The work pal with the charisma of Stanley Tucci. Hell, even the selfish boyfriend who at least makes great grilled cheese. We wanted all the highs and lows, if it meant becoming a success. After all, we are a generation obsessed with status, the hustle and grinding hard until burnout hits. If an outlier like Andy could break into such an exclusive industry – with those bushy eyebrows and onion bagels – through hard work and talent, maybe our own career dreams could come true.
That industry is now on its knees. “Do you remember when magazines were a thing?” snarls gamekeeper turned poacher Emily, who has since moved to Dior – the company whose ads are propping up Runway. Last year, more than 3,000 journalism job losses were recorded across the UK and US. There are only a handful of editorial positions left. Promotions are scarce. Budgets are constantly being slashed. AI and influencers are replacing every damn good thing. Condé Nast – which the film’s publisher, Elias-Clarke, is based on – recently shuttered Self magazine after 47 years, while layoffs described as an “absolute bloodbath” were made at the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos’s ownership. And then there are the issues that have barely changed in this inaccessible field: the National Council for the Training of Journalists reported recently that 80% of journalists come from professional and upper-class backgrounds.
What does all this mean for our poster journalist Andy, then? She has been smashing out award-winning articles for the New York Vanguard newspaper, where she loves working despite being paid peanuts (her rented apartment looks a lot like the one she had in the first film, with a bathroom tap that runs brown water until you bash it a few times). In a wincingly close-to-the-bone moment for her now-grown-up fans, the paper abruptly closes at the behest of billionaires. She is offered the features editor job at Runway, which is another incredibly lucky opportunity, but it doesn’t seem to calm her career and life crises. “I just want you to have the apartment you deserve,” says her old mate Lily, reminding Andy that her salary is now twice as much. “For how long?” Andy replies.
She spends much of the film trying to save her job at Runway. “I have hope for the future,” she says. “I might be able to unfreeze an egg!” Yes, egg freezing is a costly procedure that excludes many. But the reality is that the number of women doing it is at an all-time high, while the rate of people having babies is drastically dropping. When a 43-year-old woman like Andy – with that middle-class background and a great career – still feels too wobbly to consider starting a family, what does that really say?
To be clear, this has nothing to do with Andy’s single status: lessons have been learned since the previous film’s disaster boyfriends, pathetic Nate and super-rat Christian. “Andy had gone around the world and had adventures,” says the screenwriter of both films, Aline Brosh McKenna. “I felt like she would have had a lot of boyfriends in the meantime.” Her love interest now – a nice architect played by Patrick Brammall – is just a beige accessory, who might as well not be in the film at all.
This is very satisfying for modern women emotionally invested in Andy’s career, especially given that Vogue declared it embarrassing to have a boyfriend in a recent viral article. Andy is confident in her singlehood, and has rejected both settling down before 30 and waiting until she’s coupled up before having a baby. It’s another way of acknowledging DWP2’s grown-up fans: more women are choosing to be single and navigate financial independence, despite still living in a world that doesn’t support this.
This is what has happened in those crucial years since our millennial teenhood: life’s goalposts have moved, down to a dovetail of personal choice and a lack of external security. We don’t necessarily want to “have it all”, but it remains a struggle even to have choices. As Miranda says at one point, reflecting on her own role as a mother, “There’s a cost.”
Female journalists in film have always defiantly probed expectations of women. In fact “career-driven female journalist” is a beloved genre in itself, with heroines who reflect modern ideas. As far back as 1940, in His Girl Friday, Hildy (Rosalind Russell) is a star newspaper reporter – and the only female one on staff – whose editor (and ex-husband, played by Cary Grant) asks her for one last scoop before she remarries and moves to the suburbs. She has such a hoot that she walks away from the quiet life and returns to work (and gets back with the ex – I didn’t say it was perfect). By the 80s, in When Harry Met Sally, reporter Sally gives a candid speech about changing her mind on not wanting to have a baby – a conversation that still feels bold today. When Julia Roberts’s “two-faced, big-haired food critic” came along in 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding, we were in newer territory, rooting for a selfish, jealous female protagonist.
And then Bridget Jones arrived. After her boss and boyfriend, Daniel (Hugh Grant), cheats on her with a visiting colleague, Bridget (Renee Zellweger) vows “not to be defeated by a bad man and an American stick insect”, instead choosing “Chaka Khan and vodka” and quits her publishing job to pivot to TV reporting. “Nothing can distract me from my dedication to the pursuit of truth,” she says en route to cover an important human rights case, nipping out briefly to buy ciggies, Polos and a packet of Wheat Crunchies.
This causes her to miss the scoop, but she’s rescued by defence lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and becomes a national hero, signing off the exclusive interview: “This is Bridget Jones with, let’s face it, a bit of a crush now actually.” Who on earth could watch this and not want to be a journalist?
More leading female journos followed: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days’ Andie (Kate Hudson) uses a man to get ahead in her career; Confessions of a Shopaholic’s Rebecca (Isla Fisher) deals with the common but shame-cloaked issue of credit card debt; and Trainwreck’s Amy (Amy Schumer) sleeps around, smokes dope and shudders at the thought of marriage and kids – in all the ways only male characters usually do. Over on the small screen, Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was asking all the taboo questions women wanted answering. A decade later, Girls’ aspiring writer Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) declared her GQ advertorial job beneath her because, “I think that I may be the voice of my generation … or at least a voice of a generation.” Of course, Bridget Jones took swipes at stiff societal expectations, too: “Tell me, is it one in four marriages that ends in divorce or one in three?” she asks a dinner party table of smug marrieds.
It has been 25 years since Bridget Jones’s Diary, and much of the same Devil Wears Prada 2 audience will have eagerly watched last year’s fourth film. Sure, she now has the huge Hampstead Heath house and a nanny, but the 2025 instalment showed lesser-seen truths in new ways: dating in your 50s, grieving as a mother and still feeling judged for being single – even though it’s because your husband has died.
Back to The Devil Wears Prada 2, and Andy freaks out about an invitation to the Hamptons. She raids the fashion cupboard and, armed with a suitcase of designer garms, boards a coach – a coach! – that drops her off at a dinner with the likes of Tina Brown, Jon Batiste and the head of Elias-Clarke. It reminded me of when, while working for a women’s magazine, I was sent on a press trip to a St Moritz hotel where the Kennedys had holidayed, then came home to my three-bed Hackney flatshare to find our hallway mould had mushroomed as far the kitchen.
Magazine journalists are in the surreal sweet spot between aspiration and reality, like Titanic’s Jack Dawson dining in first-class. It is a truly bizarre job that makes for great entertainment. But in another 20 years, will such journalists even exist in film, or indeed, real life?
The question of a third film has been thrust on the cast a lot during their excruciating press tour. “I’m up for it!” says Meryl Streep. But it feels impossible, given the changes in society and the insecure economic climate, that such a sequel would be anything but incredibly depressing. I only hope that Andy is using this time to retrieve those eggs. And as for the future? Gird your loins.
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