Why The Devil Wears Prada Was Never Really About Fashion
Nearly 20 years after The Devil Wears Prada gnawed at our concept of the ambitious woman, screenwriter ALINE BROSH MCKENNA returns to the franchise with a more existential lens. As industries collapse, identities shift and women continue pushing against narrow definitions of likability and success, McKenna reflects on her many, messy female characters and why women should stop absorbing other people’s opinions. By NATASHA BIRD
Aline Brosh McKenna has spent her career writing interesting, often deeply flawed, messy, brilliant, definitely contradictory, but ultimately charming female characters. The success of her work as a screenwriter owes in huge part to how shrewdly (and irreverently) she portrays women at the exact point where culture gets uncomfortable with them. Namely: women wanting more than one thing; women not centering men; women who don’t prioritize being liked; and in the case of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rebecca Bunch, women who set apartments on fire, become stalkers and shove people off roofs.
From The Devil Wears Prada films and 27 Dresses, to Morning Glory and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, McKenna’s work has carved important contours into the way a generation of women sees themselves at work, in love, in power and in pursuit of a life that isn’t necessarily picture-perfect.
Now, almost 20 years after the first The Devil Wears Prada film became shorthand for both the magazine industry and the trope of the fearsome female boss, McKenna returns to its world with a sequel that reflects a completely shifted landscape.
“What attracted me to the movie was the idea that you could be such a powerful cultural figure, the way Miranda is depicted in the book and in the movie, and then see that power kind of ebb,” she says. “Cultural signifiers of importance are changing so rapidly, and people who were super important and famous fade from view so quickly.”
For McKenna, the new terrain she wanted to explore is not simply journalism after print’s imperial age. It is the world of women at work more completely. “What Andy, as a journalist, would be experiencing is similarly in a world where all the benchmarks have changed,” she says.
The original film landed in an era preoccupied with the personal cost of female ambition. The conversation focused on whether private lives were even possible when you made a career your whole identity. The new movie lands in a world where almost everyone feels like work, of any kind, is precarious. “Male, female, parent, not a parent, high ranking, not high ranking. Everyone is facing unprecedented challenges,” McKenna says. “Everyone is being squeezed at the same time.”
Even Miranda Priestly, once the ultimate avatar of untouchable power, must now adjust from a mindset of rivalry to one of survival. “The parameters have changed,” McKenna says. “Miranda can no longer throw her coat, and she has to be more sensitive about what she says in the conference room.”
As the ground shifts beneath our feet, many women are being forced to re-evaluate everything, from their careers to the ways they define themselves. For women especially, identity is often intertwined with external pigeonholing from workplaces, relationships, beauty standards and other patriarchal structures. As our options reduce, those external pressures can feel even more severe.
McKenna’s work helps us to push against that narrowing instinct. Her female characters are rarely reducible to one thing; they are ambitious and contradictory, romantic and selfish, emotionally intelligent and, yes, occasionally, hilariously disastrous. “Your life’s work can be anything from a job to raising a family to making the best backyard garden,” she says. “Having hopes and dreams and ambition of any kind, personal, professional, or otherwise, it’s really just about making sure that you’re depicting the full flower of what humans are interested in.” Sometimes, she adds, “that’s a romantic partner, and sometimes that’s a promotion.”
With Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she co-created with Rachel Bloom, “We were always trying to subvert whatever the received story was about romantic love,” she says. “The relentless messaging that women get that finding the right partner is the great quest of your life, even though we know that’s not true.”
The show was also, she says, “anti-received doctrines about what makes a woman likeable.” Let women be bawdy, irreverent, weird and emotionally forensic. “Someone also said it was the most gynecologically accurate show on television,” she laughs.
“As women we’re told to inculcate other people’s opinion of you into your own opinion of yourself,” she says. “You don’t need to do that.”
The older she gets, the freer she feels. “Society doesn’t really know what to do with women over 40,” she says. “There’s something extremely freeing there. You’re nobody’s ingénue after a certain age, and boy, there’s a lot of relief in that.”
For McKenna, perhaps the future of ambition is being less available for definition by anyone else. “All you can really do,” she says, “is dance to your own tune, really, and hope that other people want to join in.”