Women Dream of Labor, Finding Mastery, Agency and Glamour

A sequel built around the world changing

It turns out that some women do, in fact, dream of labor, at least the kind that comes with a sense of mastery, agency and glamour. That is the provocation at the center of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which reunites Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci with director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna as the action returns to Runway and a media landscape that no longer looks like it did in 2006.

The sequel is not built as a nostalgia lap. Disney’s account of the film says the story now follows Miranda Priestly as she faces a magazine industry in flux and a scandal that threatens Runway’s legacy, while Andy Sachs returns as a seasoned journalist and Emily Charlton has climbed into a senior role at a luxury brand whose backing may help keep the magazine alive. The cast expands with Kenneth Branagh, Simone Ashley, Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu, B.J. Novak, Caleb Hearon and Helen J. Shen, but the original power structure remains the point of reference.

Why the original still feels unusually sharp

The first film, released in 2006, followed a young woman from the Midwest who moves to New York and lands as the assistant to the tyrannical editor-in-chief of a major fashion magazine. That setup did more than create a workplace comedy. It made ambition visible, stylized and expensive, and it treated competence as a form of transformation rather than a dry professional virtue. Runway was a fantasy machine, but it was also a pressure cooker, which is why the film’s lines are still quoted and its scenes still memed.

That balance is what makes the sequel’s premise matter. The new film keeps the old allure, but it places that allure inside a collapsing print economy and a changed labor market, which means the glamour is no longer separate from the threat. Andy’s return as an editor and Emily’s ascent into luxury branding show that the old Runway ladder was never just about obedience. It was about whether women could convert taste, discipline and status into leverage on their own terms.

Why women’s ambition still reads as a surprise

The cultural surprise is not that women work. It is that a film can frame work itself as desirable, even seductive, without treating that desire as a mistake. The New York Times’ framing of the sequel makes the point plainly: women are often nudged, by culture and economics alike, to give up on the satisfactions of professional success. This movie pushes in the opposite direction, asking why the hunger for mastery should be treated as less human, or less feminine, than the longing for romance or domestic ease.

That is why the film’s version of glamour feels politically interesting, even when it looks frivolous on the surface. Miranda’s authority is not coded as decorative, Andy’s growth is not reduced to self-sacrifice, and Emily’s rise is not framed as a moral correction. In Hollywood, men are routinely allowed to chase power as destiny. Women are more often written as though power must either ruin them or redeem them. Runway refuses that simplification by making ambition look like a lived aesthetic, not just a burden.

What Runway remembers that Hollywood often forgets

The deeper lesson of The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that labor can be identity, style and self-command all at once. That is the reason the franchise still resonates: it understands that women do not have to choose between competence and glamour, or between professional appetite and interior life. The sequel’s own creators describe it as a story shaped by how the world has changed, and that includes the stubborn fact that a woman’s relationship to work is still one of the last places cinema can show power without asking for apology.

Hollywood has spent decades coding female ambition as a cautionary tale, while letting male ambition pass as common sense. The Devil Wears Prada line cuts through that habit because it knows a woman can want the room, the clothes, the access and the authority at the same time. That is not a retreat from feminism. It is a reminder that agency is not only about escape. Sometimes it is about mastering the job so completely that the job becomes the point.