Before we begin, a disclaimer: My tolerance for trashy literature is quite high. I love an airport novel—the frothier the better—and my preferred vacation reading is the literary equivalent of Love Island. The point being: I am not a snob. I love a bad rom-com. I love anything a bit tacky and aughts-coded. A good montage scene set to Madonna, and I’m sold. All of which is probably why The Devil Wears Prada holds a specific and sizeable place in my heart.
When I started working at British Vogue, people would ask—after giving my outfit a once over—“What’s it like?” which roughly translated to, “How Devil Wears Prada is it?” While I’m yet to spot a cerulean belt or a Harry Potter manuscript flying around the office (though there was a Manolo Blahnik gift bag kicking around the other day), I can’t pretend the 2006 film didn’t shape my career aspirations and hair color choices. And there have definitely been moments in my personal and professional life that have bordered on cosplay, e.g. the time I got hit by a car and went as black-eyed, red-haired, hobbling Emily for Halloween (sadly, no Hermès scarves in sight).
Despite cranking up KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See” during moments of anguish, there’s been a void in my life that only Andy, Miranda, and the gang could fill—and so I decided it was time to plug that Prada-shaped hole with the original book’s creatively named follow-up: Revenge Wears Prada.
The novel picks up a decade after Andy dramatically quit Runway after one too many trips around Paris in a town car. She’s now the editor of a glossy bridal magazine and is married to Max Harrison, a vaguely Succession-adjacent publishing heir with outdoorsy hobbies and a sensitive side (he doesn’t drink). Within a few chapters, I was bored to tears of the placeholder hunk that is Max, though at least the God-awful Jarlsberg-loving boyfriend from the first film had disappeared to Boston, taking his port wine reductions and unsupportive attitude with him.
The book jumps around in time, flitting between Andy’s mysteriously persistent stomach bug (spoiler: it’s pregnancy), six-figure wedding, and her run-in with Emily at an after-work back-to-basics cooking class. After 2.5 sentences of hostility, they trauma bond over shared Miranda PTSD and giggle their way out of the soufflé-making session arm in arm, deciding to start a bridal magazine together. I know 2013 was a different time, but even so, The Plunge feels like an abysmal name for a publication, whatever the year, and I can’t really believe that disgraced fashion-conscious women wiled away their hours being instructed on how to make scrambled eggs.
The rest of the novel unfolds in a fluffy blur of exposed-brick open-plan lofts, tropical photoshoots, and fashion closet-centric flashbacks. Emily inevitably betrays Andy, Miranda is still the same old tyrant, and somehow Andy ends up back with her awful ex. Despite reading the book in two days, it left me pining for a rewatch rather than reaching for the next in the series: When Life Gives You Lululemons.
The glory of The Devil Wears Prada lies not in the plot, which is pretty thin, but in the nuances of the styling, the withering glances, and the perfume ad-style soundtrack. Punctuated by nondescript aughts music, clacking heels, and Chanel boots, these two-dimensional archetypes come to life. If you strip away the chunky belts and statement eye makeup, the characters fall flat. On paper, Miranda is reduced to a soulless sadist, Emily to a vacuous Miranda-worshipping skeleton whose main objective is to tell Andy not to eat (an unfair approximation of the character Emily Blunt brought to life—there was nothing two-dimensional about all that blue eyeshadow).
All of this is to say that I’m cautiously optimistic about The Devil Wears Prada’s return to the big screen. Thankfully, the producers seem to have ditched the bridal-magazine storyline, and Emily is instead a senior figure at an LVMH-coded organization (far more plausible) now, while Miranda is struggling with the death of print (...). Although the pap shots so far don’t fill me with hope for any Phoebe Philo Céline in the open-plan office, I’m happy to have Andy back on my radar without having to slog through the rest of the books. Beach-reading aside, I won’t be revisiting Revenge Wears Prada anytime soon.