In anticipation of The Devil Wears Prada 2’s release on May 1, the Replica Handbag Store Book Club is making its way through the original source material—and oh, what material it is!
Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel shares plenty of DNA with the feature film it would eventually inspire, but the movie made some significant edits to the book’s plot—chief among them, skipping the dramatic downward spiral of protagonist Andy Sachs’s best friend, Lily; and significantly complicating the character of Miranda Priestly, Runway’s frosty editor-in-chief.
This week, Vogue spoke to The Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna—who returned to pen the script for the sequel—about her experience of turning one of the hottest romans-à-clef of the aughts into a box-office hit.
Vogue: What was your reaction when you first read The Devil Wears Prada?
Aline Brosh McKenna: I saw the cover of the book before I read it, and I was like, I want that. I want to read that. You know, I think the idea of being in the workplace for first time as a young woman, and all the personal and professional challenges you face, is something I’ve always been really interested in, for obvious reasons. When I sat down and read the book, I just felt like it was such a good portrayal of being an ambitious young woman in New York, which I had been, and I felt like it did such a good job of accurately capturing the specifics of a certain world. Sometimes books about workplaces are sort of vague about the details, and this was so incredibly detailed. I was completely captivated by it, right from the beginning.
How did you end up becoming attached to the film?
Wendy Finerman, one of our producers, optioned the book before it was finished, so it was already at Fox 2000—which was a division of Fox at that time—and they had been working on it for a few years. A bunch of other writers had taken a shot at it, and then they decided to pivot from writer to director, so they hired David Frankel and told him that he could hire whoever he wanted. I’d never met him, but I had been chasing the book the whole time, and when I heard that he could hire whoever he wanted, I just assumed that he was going to hire a friend of his. I didn’t know him, so I really met him completely cold and went in and pitched my ideas, and they just happened to really line up with his ideas.
In fact, at some point we compared the documents we both used for our meetings, and they were very similar, with the main thing being that we both felt it was important not to exaggerate or make things too silly or cartoonish. There’s sometimes a tendency in certain workplaces—and, maybe not coincidentally, workplaces that are largely populated by women—to make it a little campy and goofy, and it was really important to both of us that we try and and show an audience how serious a business this was. We wanted to show the exigencies of this specific business and sort of show people that it wasn’t just pinning fabric on a mannequin or tossing something in the window of a store; there’s this very complex machinery that goes into making fashion, showing fashion to the world, selling fashion. We shared an interest in those specifics.
What aspects of the book were you eager—or not so eager—to use in the script?
I felt like it was important to understand what Andy was walking away from [in the end], and we spent a lot of time talking about that, because there’s a difference between feeling, like, I am personally disaffected, as opposed to, This job assignment doesn’t reflect my values. There’s sort of a fine line between those things. We spent a lot of time talking about what ended up being that final scene in the car.
You know, it says “devil” in the title, and it’s a story that’s very much about someone who is being dragged away from what she said she wanted to do, and how easy it is for her to be dragged away from it. Andy sort of feels like she’s too good for Runway when she first lands there, which is an interesting proxy for the audience; as I was saying, I think people underestimate the business of fashion and the melding of art and commerce and how interesting that is. She initially feels like, Oh, this is beneath me, and then the movie is a journey of her figuring out what’s important to her, what her values are, and how that contrasts with Miranda. David used to remind me frequently that the movie is called The Devil Wears Prada, not, you know, The Not-So-Nice Lady Wears Prada, so it was important that she represent something specific and sort of a value shift away from what Andy had come to expect.
Was there any The Devil Wears Prada character you were particularly eager to catch up with after almost two decades?
I just was really excited to see them all again. The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not based on Lauren’s sequel—it’s a new story—so there was a freedom there. In this case, we were freer to do what we thought the story called for. I’ve always loved those characters; they’ve stayed present to me for a long time. I think none of us thought that a sequel would make sense, but then as the world started to change so rapidly, especially since 2019 or so, all these businesses have sort of been turned upside down and and shaken. The three big businesses in the film—publishing, fashion, and journalism—had all had undergone such seismic shifts, and that seemed interesting, almost like you were going into a completely different workplace.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
