Patrick Lenton says he does not know a single journalist his age who has not ricocheted around a shrinking media industry, shunted through buyouts, redundancies and pivots to video. In his telling, the dream sold by The Devil Wears Prada has curdled into something far less glamorous: a profession where the next restructure is never far away and the reward for hard work can be another round of cuts.
That is why the sequel’s version of Runway lands with such bite. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the glossy magazine is on hard times, its physical edition reduced to little more than a book of brand ads. Miranda Priestly is forced to fly economy and eat in the cafeteria, while a new owner takes over the title and Andy is working as a journalist at a newspaper.
The biggest blow comes while Andy is accepting a journalism award. She learns then that she and the entire paper have been made redundant after a buyout. It is a punchline built from the same material Lenton says has defined the industry he entered: prestige on the outside, instability underneath.
Lenton said he rage-quit from an editor job at a digital youth media publication at the beginning of the pandemic, after his team had been slashed to an exhausted handful who cried every morning. He said his freelance budget had been cut to zero even as he was still expected to hit traffic targets. Two weeks later, the publication was sold.
He said The Devil Wears Prada once sold him the fantasy of becoming a journalist and impressing Meryl Streep through hard work and a can-do attitude. What replaced that, in his view, was a depressing capitalistic reality dominated by mass layoffs, redundancies, media buyouts and tech pivots. He also said he had worked at an online outlet trying to balance real reporting for a young audience with silly content, progressive ideals and the need to earn minimum wage from advertising.
The result, he said, was an industry where some of the best minds of his generation were writing lists about which of the Muppets were most fuckable, or ranking Disney princesses by how likely they would have died in the Challenger disaster. That is the world The Devil Wears Prada 2 is joking about now, and it is a joke that only works because the old joke stopped being funny years ago.
