Tright here’s to be a follow-up to the movie The Satan Wears Prada, with authentic screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, “in talks” to supply the script. The 2006 comedy, starring Anne Hathaway as Andy, the put-upon assistant to Meryl Streep’s glacial New York trend journal editor, Miranda Priestly, was an infinite world hit (taking $327m on the field workplace). In addition to the deliberate sequel, there’s a stage musical opening on the Dominion theatre in London’s West Finish on the finish of this month, starring Vanessa Williams as Priestly, with music by Elton John. Nearly twenty years after the authentic, it seems the franchise has been reawakened, however so too have the problematic points surrounding it.
The primary level to be made about The Satan Wears Prada is that it was, to make use of trend vernacular, fabulous, darling! Primarily based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, a thinly disguised account of her time working as Anna Wintour’s assistant at US Vogue, it was a genuinely witty movie about trend which, save for Ben Stiller’s elegant Zoolander, are surprisingly uncommon. Curiously, for an business teeming with huge characters, cinematic takes have tended in direction of the laboured (Robert Altman’s 1994 Prêt-à-Porter), the misfiring (2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic) and the downright dreary (Daniel Day-Lewis’s designer moping about like he’d swallowed a pin cushion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018).
Vivid, sparky, acid, glamorous, The Satan Wears Prada not solely tiptoed in Louboutin heels previous all the same old pitfalls of trend cinema, it served up vivid characters: Hathaway’s beleaguered ingenue; Emily Blunt’s patronising Emily, and Stanley Tucci’s homosexual trend maven – roles that turbo-launched their careers into orbit. Streep’s chicly vicious Wintour-esque flip as Priestly gained her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
Furthermore, the movie was ultra-female: written by a girl, primarily based on a e-book by a feminine writer, constructed virtually fully round memorable feminine characters – none of which needs to be discounted when Hollywood nonetheless tends to view “girls’s movies” with suspicion. There’s a lot to admire in regards to the comedy. However then it involves the consuming.
Too typically, the attitudes to physique requirements appear caught in a sizeist darkish ages. In a single scene, Andy deprives herself of a grilled cheese sandwich to slot in with the style set. In one other, Emily talks about her new weight-reduction plan: “Effectively, I don’t eat something, and, after I really feel like I’m about to faint, I eat a dice of cheese.” And, so on, all performed for giggles.
It’s wince-making: harking back to the Seventies when girls have been hypnotised into eating on cottage cheese and lettuce leaves to attain some legendary good form. Whilst a satire, The Satan Wears Prada tapped into dimension anxiousness, making the objectively slim Andy fuss about her completely regular urge for food. Whereas Andy wasn’t anorexic, she personified that low-grade consuming dysfunction (not unease about consuming an excessive amount of, nearly consuming) that too typically passes for “regular”. Andy additionally represented (with out the movie seeming to grasp it) how a lot trend/trend publishing has contributed to that strain through the years.
Even accepting The Satan Wears Prada as a movie of its time, there have been no makes an attempt to counter the size-zero tyranny of the early 00s, when the likes of Nicole Richie staggered round with cavernous sack-like purses to make themselves look (hurrah!) even thinner. Its personal mania for skinniness was so amplified, it arguably glamorised and normalised disordered consuming, as a lot as lampooning it.
It could be one factor if this was now not an issue in our switched-on, size-inclusive occasions, nevertheless it appears all will not be effectively within the enviornment of physique positivity. Not too long ago, there have been complaints from alarmed trend editors in regards to the return of super-thinness to the Ozempic-infested catwalks. Reportedly, there are visibly skeletal fashions, some with the furry arms which might be an anorexic “inform” that the starved physique is attempting to warmth itself. Vogue Enterprise’s newest size-inclusivity report says: “The physique positivity motion has misplaced steam in mainstream tradition because the pendulum has swung again to the glamorisation of thinness.”
A lot for #bodypos – evidently the vogue for emaciation was simply mendacity low, ready for the lip service to dimension inclusivity to cross. Is that this the fault of The Satan Wears Prada? In fact not. It isn’t even simply the fault of the style business. From influencers to TikTok, this poison has unfold deep into the cultural water provide. The query for The Satan Wears Prada considerations the modified local weather it will likely be returning to: whether or not, as an example, the gen Z viewers can be in any temper for “not consuming” jokes, ought to they be included.
One other space that may conflict with gen Z attitudes is how exhausting the unique movie pushes what may very well be described because the “company abuse masquerading as skilled audition” theme: beginner Andy grovelling round Miranda Priestly. All of which appears to be like considerably jarring, practically twenty years later, when youthful generations have been routinely interning for subsequent to nothing, or zilch, conned into working for the publicity or expertise. And even these younger persons are considered because the “lucky” ones who’ve the connections and the household backing to work for subsequent to nothing. Whereas earlier generations additionally “paid their dues”, this was seen because the nursery slope to skilled life, not the entire ski soar.
Enter gen Z: famend for having a “bratty”, entitled angle within the office, however who can blame them once they’ve seen how earlier cohorts have been exploited? To place into this context, is the trend greenhorn who simply needs to breathe the aromatic air of the hallowed corridors of favor, and who would do something for a pair of Marc Jacobs sneakers from the trend cabinet, old-fashioned? Are younger individuals too clued up and offended nowadays? Nonetheless aspirational the style world stays, if the sequel consists of a teen, they will’t be something like Andy.
There are different quibbles with The Satan Wears Prada. In Priestly, it delivers one more robust display lady who’s mainly a monster. It’s important to marvel why so many highly effective girls in cinema are diminished to the extent of Disney witches. Because the sequel is reported to take care of Priestly on her uppers, pressured to kowtow to the newly dominant Emily, would possibly this imply there’ll be some humanising insights into sexist-ageist pressures?
Likewise, the Tucci character – the amusing homosexual man, mainly follows the template set by Rupert Everett in My Greatest Good friend’s Marriage ceremony in 1997. Admittedly, I fairly take pleasure in these performances, however nonetheless, in 2024, is that this the one means homosexual male characters can get display time? This is able to even be the time to complain about Andy’s boyfriend, Nate, who spends many of the film belittling her supposedly trivial profession, but is by some means upheld because the voice of (mansplaining) cause. Nonetheless, a fast look round reveals that persons are already on to Nate because the movie’s true villain.
Lastly, there’s us – the public. How are we going to observe the sequel? Nonetheless lazily waving via sexism, sizeism, ageism and stereotypes, as long as the garments are snappy and the jokes good? The Satan Wears Prada was a smash hit earlier than trend and the broader world corrected itself. It seems to be returning simply as a number of the larger issues related to the movie entrench themselves once more.
It was a miracle the primary time how they managed to make such an important comedy film out of the style business – the place a lot of it simply isn’t humorous. It is going to be attention-grabbing to see if they will pull it off once more.
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