Commentary: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2' delivers a chic eulogy for print

In "The Devil Wears Prada 2," the most striking update isn't the fashion. It's the collapse of the glossy world of fashion journalism that its characters inhabited in the original film. But the sequel doesn't just register the decline, it underscores how any response to it in the real world begins inside a narrowed set of possibilities - one in which the ultimate price is the loss of editorial judgment.

Media, of course, has never been untouched by wealth. From newspaper barons to modern private equity owners, journalism has always operated within the constraints of whoever funds it. But what feels different now is how few alternative models remain and how concentrated that control has become in the hands of a smaller class of billionaires.

Laying this all out on the big screen, for an audience beyond media insiders, helps bring the stakes into sharper public view. In doing so, the film delivers a chic eulogy for print journalism, but also highlights why it's still worth saving by showing what stands to be lost.

In an early scene, Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly laments that Runway's once-mighty September issue - a supersized edition that generates cultural fanfare and advertising revenue - is now "so thin you could floss with it." It's a killer laugh line, but it also functions as a sobering diagnosis. In an era of clickbait and diminished attention spans, the old logic of prestige publishing - that quality commands attention and attention commands revenue - no longer holds.

As the magazine struggles to stay afloat, the film introduces Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a tech billionaire dating Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), the first film's brittle assistant-turned-rival fashion executive. Clearly evoking Jeff Bezos, Benji's offer to acquire Runway - the fictional counterpart of Vogue - suggests that journalism's survival depends less on the quality of the work itself than on securing the right benefactor.

That precariousness is why real-life magazine staffers have described "The Devil Wears Prada 2" as being "close to the bone." Billionaire ownership has become an increasingly dominant model for keeping legacy media afloat: Bezos and The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong and The Los Angeles Times, Laurene Powell Jobs and The Atlantic, Marc Benioff and Time. The specifics of each arrangement differ, but they carry a risk that, while the publication lives on, the terms of its survival remain perpetually negotiable.

When journalism's future depends on private wealth, and on whether owners influence editorial direction, it sidesteps the deeper structural problem: the collapse of the revenue and distribution models that once sustained these outlets.

Yet the more telling crisis is behavioral. Vogue's own September issue has been shrinking for years, and "The Devil Wears Prada 2" dramatizes that shift in a subplot involving Miranda's former assistant, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway). As Runway's new features editor, she produces thoughtful, rigorously reported journalism - the kind that defines what these publications are supposed to stand for. Unfortunately, the traffic does not follow.

This disconnect feels especially pointed at a moment when Americans are following the news substantially less closely than they did a decade ago, according to a Pew Research Center study. Billionaire patrons can't guarantee they'll bring audiences back to the journalism worth reading and away from the short-form content many people are inclined to click on today.

The consequences extend beyond glossy magazines. Across the media landscape, hedge funds and private equity firms have acquired hundreds of local newspapers, gutting their newsrooms in the name of efficiency. Licensing deals squeeze value from legacy brands, while the editorial staff that gave them legitimacy disappears. An outlet can produce Pulitzer Prize-winning work, but get shuttered while the parent company pivots to cheaper content that earns more pageviews. The result is a news ecosystem in which the brand endures, but the journalism often does not - and where the solution, invariably, is the same: find someone wealthy enough to care - or at least willing to subsidize the loss.

This is where "The Devil Wears Prada 2" becomes more disheartening than it perhaps intends. For all the film's skepticism toward tech-world disruption, it ultimately retreats to the more optimistic fantasy of a benevolent benefactor who swoops in and buys Runway. (The character is Benji's philanthropist ex-wife, which some have pointed out calls to mind Bezos's ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott.) In other words, the resolution is imagined not as a structural transformation, but as an injection of capital from an investor without an underlying agenda.

As a crowd-pleasing sequel, "The Devil Wears Prada 2" is entitled to an idealistic coda, but the industry it's depicting is rarely so fortunate. Legacy media is in genuine crisis: Advertising revenue has collapsed, artificial intelligence threatens to hollow out what's left of editorial, and public trust in journalism remains at historic lows.

When these forces undermine an essential pillar of democracy, a movie about the financial struggles of a fictional Vogue might seem trivial compared to "All the President's Men" or "Spotlight." But whether journalistic institutions are holding the powerful to account or explaining the significance of cerulean, the question of who controls them should remain fashionably urgent.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Miles Surrey is a Brooklyn-based culture writer. His work has also appeared in The Ringer, Men's Health, and Vox.

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This story was originally published May 8, 2026 at 6:09 AM.