The Devil Wears Prada is a strange title to revisit in 2026, because since so much has changed in the 20 years since. For one thing, toxic work environments stopped being a laughing matter in 2017, when The New York Times called out Harvey Weinstein (current residence: Rikers Island). For another thing, so much of our culture has been revolutionized by online delivery services that there’s no longer any comic leeway to be had from the sight of Anne Hathaway running through New York traffic clutching a dozen extra-hot, no-foam, extra-shot non-fat caffè lattes and a balancing six pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes on her head while walking a Saint Bernard (surely there’s a Door Dash now for that).

To its credit, David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 does accept that time has passed, and when we rejoin it, Runway magazine is no longer the iconic media institution it used to be. “Digital, downloadable, streamable,” sighs Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), its second-in-command. “We’re in the ether.” They are also up the creek, thanks to an ill-advised partnership with a fashion company using cheap labor from a foreign sweatshop. Runway is going virulently viral for all the wrong reasons, and its editor, the legendary Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), is, for once, at a loss for a withering mot juste when her advertisers demand an explanation.

Luckily for her, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), her former assistant, is back on the job market — in the film’s opening scenes, while receiving an award for journalistic excellence at a lavish ceremony, Andy and her whole team are fired by text message. This news soon wings its way to Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), the magazine’s publisher, who hires her to be Runway’s features editor. Andy assumes that Miranda must have been the driving force, but she is dismayed when her former boss not only pretends not to remember her previous stint there, she also begins to undermine Andy’s best efforts at every turn.

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Like the last film, a lot depends on the pulling in of a massive favor to get Miranda’s attention: Then, it was the manuscript of the new, unpublished Harry Potter book, now it is the landing of an interview with Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), half of recently split billionaire power couple. But just as Andy seems to be making headway with her reporting, and Miranda is about to be made Global Head of Content, Irv dies and leaves everything to his son Jay (B.J. Novak). Jay does not share his father’s affection for the rag trade, and immediately sets about asset-stripping the company, putting Miranda’s promotion on hold.

The funny thing is that, also like the 2006 film, the sequel doesn’t seem to have too much interest in the fashion world either. In both films, Andy is A Serious Journalist who’s slumming it in the land of Valentino, McQueen and Lacroix. Admittedly, the last film did have Miranda’s note-perfect takedown of Andy’s fashion ignorance in the now-famous “Cerulean jumper” speech — a very precise illustration of Miranda’s knowledge about the cycle of “trickle-down” fashion — but this time round, there’s a lot less of that and much more conflation of haute couture, off-the-peg and very, very expensive designer handbags.

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But a bigger problem is that the film doesn’t really have a story. Following the most basic template for a sequel, it sends everyone off to a different foreign country (Milan Fashion Week instead of Paris), where Andy must team up with her on-off nemesis Emily (Emily Blunt) — now a big shot at Dior and dating Sasha Barnes’ vulgar but very rich ex Benjy (a very game Justin Theroux) — to find a new owner for Runway. This sets up a bafflingly complex series of plots and counterplots that can’t quite disguise the fact that there only two people in the movie’s world with pockets deep enough to buy out the company.

Of course, the main cast can play these kinds of parts in their sleep, but, even while doing her best with such flimsy material, Streep does seem to be on more of a leash this time (a running joke that Miranda is being policed by her current assistant, who hisses “H.R.” every time she makes a very inoffensive “un-PC” comment, simply underlines that). Always the trouper, Tucci steps up to fill the gap, stealing his scenes with a lot more of what worked so well in the first film; like Gus-Gus the mouse in Cinderella, he’s Andy’s little helper, transforming her into a princess every time she stops by his magic stock cupboard for a loan.

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There’s also, however, a troubling sense that some of the other players are playing their parts in their sleep, and for a rom-com, there’s precious little rom, either in Miranda’s dull-as-ditchwater fiddle-playing husband (Kenneth Branagh) or Andy’s deeply boring love interest Peter (Patrick Brammall), a property developer who flips old buildings and finally becomes a walking metaphor for the film’s inability to decide whether literally gutting the old ways is a good thing or bad.

Worst of all, like Zoolander 2 did before it, the film badly miscalculates the value of showbiz and industry cameos, which reach critical mass when the team members fly to Milan and, weirdly, only one of the latter (Donatella Versace, having an awkward lunch with Emily) seems to work. That’s perhaps because, in the end,  The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, once again, more invested in Andy’s fairytale journey than anyone else’s. Indeed, she rises above all the obstacles put in front of her to such an extent that it’s a wonder she doesn’t throw her hat up into the air at the end of the title sequence: Like Mary Tyler Moore, she’s gonna make it after all!

Title: The Devil Wears Prada 2
Director: David Frankel
Screenwriter: Aline Brosh McKenna
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Stanley Tucci, Emily Blunt, Lucy Liu, Justin Theroux
Distributor: 20th Century Studios
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins