“The Devil Wears Prada 2” zeroes in on the actual “impossible job” at hand
+ my brief interlude in gala attendance
As part of my somewhat half-hearted strength training and protein-loading journey (don’t be afraid, I still strained my back from simply sitting too long on a floor cushion over the weekend), I have landed on the morning miso soup as a nice answer to the breakfast question. All it takes is boiling up some water, adding cubed soft tofu, letting that simmer for two min, and then let it cool slightly in a bowl before stirring in a spoon of miso paste, some scallions, and little sheaves of snacking seaweed. Waaaay easier than eggs and toast.
Some mornings, I pour it all into thermos to sip on the train to the office. My current experiment now is pushing the limits on how much tofu I can cram in. I started off with ⅓ of a regular 16oz pack, but then when I realized that I can’t really taste or feel the tofu as it goes down, one could easily up it to ½ a pack per morning. BUT I COULD KEEP GOING. What if I end up consuming a whole pound of tofu every morning for breakfast? Has Joe Rogan tried THAT?
Did you have a chance to watch The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the weekend? I’ve been dying to discuss. My chief complaints — because what would the point of releasing a follow-up to a millennial touchstone on work culture and magazine publishing be otherwise — are as follows (spoilers abound):
Andy’s love interest, played by Patrick Brammall, and that whole storyline was so boring that I only ever felt paroxysms of anger whenever he came onscreen. CERTAINLY not desire, or even pretend happiness that Andy has found, what, a bland real estate guy to, what, answer her text messages? I thought this was a franchise about ASPIRATION, sorry to Patrick Brammall! Given how endlessly optimized every second of runtime was for product placement or referencing the first movie, this whole part seemed like a waste of everyone’s time and retinal capacity. I don’t even think it would have been some radical choice to let Andy be successful mid-career without having a partner or spouse — there was so much going on otherwise that I doubt we would have even noticed.
The default to “good billionaire owner, bad billionaire owner” trope. The plot around Runway’s future as a magazine felt appropriately ripped straight from the Condé cafeteria, set into motion with the death of the S.I. Newhouse character and the rising cultural power of
Jeff BezosJustin Theroux’s character, who wants to buy the magazine for his new girlfriend. (Around this time last year, rumors were flying around that Bezos was actually considering buying Vogue as a wedding present for Lauren Sanchez). The resolution of havingMacKenzie ScottLucy Liu’s character step in and buy the magazine instead (and of course, bequeathing Miranda and her team total editorial control) was such a conventional fantasy that I think I snorted out loud in the theater. I don’t suppose I expected Runway to turn into a like, a subscription-backed media co-op, but it’s annoying that even in our wildest fantasies, no one has a neater solution for the future of media.To that point: I did think it was interesting for this second movie to continue on the theme of the “impossible media job.” In the first movie, the whole bit centers on Andy rising to meet the demands of her impossible job as Miranda navigates her own impossible job (with Emily muddling along somewhere in between). In DWP2, the actual impossible job broadens out to Saving The Magazine. Instead of the mercurial but ultimately contained constraints of one demanding boss, everyone at Runway is forced to work together and kowtow to the moneyed interests who actually rule the roost. The joke seems to be that the Miranda Priestly of DWP1 was actually more of a comrade in the trenches than anyone ever imagined. Quite the positive spin for Anna Wintour’s legacy; a bit of a buzzkill for the entire fantasy underpinning the DWP-iverse in the first place.
The best parts:
The implication that Miranda Priestly had some kind of DEI training off-screen. This was honestly the most successful (new) joke in the movie
The spotlight on Milan as the European fashion capital (or at least where they do Vogue World) over Paris — now that is the international stroke of spon-con I would like to know more details about
Simone Ashley, who looked so incredibly good at all times
Tina Brown’s cameo at the Hamptons tablescape (which she wrote about here, making the shoot sound so deliciously unglamorous)
The specificity and realism of Andy’s $350K book deal; I was like mmm you know what that’s probably absolutely correct.
The part where Meryl as Miranda gets very very close to articulating something interesting about fashion magazine-making as a philosophical pursuit of beauty and human effort. It almost scratches the itch of making her job (or any job) feel like it actually is this noble pure thing — cut to her purring in the cab later about how much she loves work, unabashedly and unapologetically — but I was thirsting for something a little more clear-eyed about beauty’s relationship to money. That’s probably the biggest question that the movie provoked for me: Has beauty (that is, beautiful magazines about beautiful clothes) only ever really existed to serve the rich (billionaires, Dior, all the faceless VICs we serve in the end)? And if so, what actually makes that endeavor still worthy in the end? Surely Miranda Priestly has something fantastic to say about that.
Mostly I left the movie very curious if Lauren Weisberger is very, very rich now. Per her update in Vogue, she currently lives on a fishing boat in the Bahamas, so it seems yes but also she still has to like, use Zoom for work, so maybe there’s only one “very” to be deployed as a descriptor.
Actually okay, the final thing I’m curious about regarding all this DWP mania and the Met Gala tonight is……..is the fact that Anna Wintour can both align herself and the magazine with A) a movie that makes very obvious fun of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez in no uncertain terms and also B) still have Bezos/Sanchez on as chief sponsors of her little fundraising event the only proof we need that she is first and foremost the GOAT? Or does Bezchez simply happen to have a way better sense of humor that we give them credit for?
Micro Party Report: Gabbing with Gloria + CULTURED’s Cult 100 Gala
Finally, in honor of tonight’s festivities, I bring you a micro dispatch from a different gala and overall bizarre day I had last week: On Thursday afternoon, I found myself trundling over to the Upper East Side with an extra pair of heels and not a clue in the world when I might get to go home. First stop was Gloria Steinem’s apartment, where Warby Parker was convening a veritable summit meeting between Gloria and Lena Dunham.
If you read the Vogue recap here, you’ll note that at one point, Gloria proposed a not-that-rhetorical question on whether anyone is being asked if they are a “feminist” anymore. Unfortunately I was sitting nearby and said “no” to myself accidentally loudly that Big G zeroed in and asked me what I meant (thank you Vogue for not including that part). I so wish I had said something like, well the standard for moral purity is so high these days that if you identify by a certain label, all of your past present and future actions will be judged against it; instead I was like, ummmmmmm it’s kind of a dated term? which I do not recommend for one’s likely only interaction with the most prominent activist of our time.
It was very, very bizarre to be inside her actual apartment; I was too scared to use the main bathroom because looking at Gloria Steinem’s tub felt kind of illegal? (Later, some people were sitting on the edge of her bed and taking photos; this is just me but if I were a 92-year-old icon I would probably throw everyone in jail for doing so.) Of her decor, I’ll say this: there was a lot of elephant stuff, including one random mylar balloon in the shape of an elephant, cut loose and trapped against the ceiling. Rather whimsical!
After the talk, I very generously got a lift from Lena and her team to the CULTURED gala at the Guggenheim, which is a place I have been dying to experience as a party venue…but alas. I guess I kind of visualized that everyone would be walking up and down the spiral, maybe shouting across the way once you spotted so-and-so, but as it turned out, you couldn’t bring any glassware or drinks up past the atrium, so we were mostly condemned to the over-crowded pit. It was the first time I’ve ever been to a thing where celebs are just free range out in the open like that, and it was funny to see how everyone was moving extremely carefully lest an errant elbow knock down Kaia Gerber walking by. Mostly I was just congratulating myself on mastering the logistics for the day: I’d gotten a long-overdue haircut in the morning, worn my dress (borrowed from a friend’s label, Gauntlett Cheng) under a blazer with flats to Gloria’s, changed into (also borrowed) heels in the car, and managed to stow everything in a giant tote bag at coat check upon arrival. (I also borrowed this purse from Susan Alexandra — not linking for affiliate just out of gratitude lol — which was perfect as a conversation starter and as a lightweight bag that doesn’t flop around on your shoulder or require being hiked up all night.)
Someone later asked me if the party was fun, and I had to think about it and say that it wasn’t fun in a conventional way, in that no one was dancing (the acoustics of a museum in the shape of a spiral, it turns out, are total ass) or like, doing fun substances that I could see. (To get anything stiffer than prosecco, you had to cross the oceania of the atrium to find the martini bar by the ice sculpture, which I touched just to make sure it really was ice, which in hindsight must have looked like some real country mouse shit.) One of the most unexpected belles of the ball was undeniably the author Emma Cline, who looked like a third Fanning sister in real life and appeared to have brought Nathan Fielder as her date. (I asked a mutual friend if she would mind introducing us; we circled the unofficial receiving line for a while before giving up.) Everyone was mostly just looking and pointing at everyone else; whenever I ran into someone I knew, usually another writer, my pretty useless opener was “Did you know there’s a coat check?” Shortly after 10pm, it died down and I went outside to chat with a few more friends before hopping into one of the waiting cabs. That was a nice touch, I decided. One should always have an easy way out when going back to reality.
