As soon as The Devil Wears Prada 2 was released on 1st May 2026, I made a beeline to book my ticket. I went to the cinema all excited about the show-stopping fashion I'd get to experience, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Don't get me wrong, Miranda's Dries Van Noten jacket, Emily's I.AM.GIA Marrion corset, and Andy's Rabanne Nano 1969 Chainmail Bag did not disappoint, but the most striking thing about the film, for me, was the way it highlighted how technology is suffocating creativity.

With 5,000 daily scrolls and 47-second attention spans, creativity doesn't stand a chance.

The film opens with Andy Sachs, now in her early 40s, being laid off by text message during a journalism awards ceremony where she has been nominated for an investigative piece. As the nominees are being read out, her phone buzzes, and so does every other phone at her table. The entire newsroom finds out they have been fired. The protagonist won the award and got fired at the same time. 

You might think this is an exaggeration, but let me show you why it isn't.

In another scene, we see Stanley Tucci's Nigel Kipling preparing a fashion shoot. He has spent the better part of a morning getting the angle of a model's wrist exactly right, he has chosen the accessories, fought over the light, and the shot is, by every measure that has mattered to him for 30 years, perfect.

And then Nigel admits to Andy that he spent hours getting that perfect image out there, only for people to scroll past it. All that hard work and all that dedication to get every detail right, just to grab someone's attention for maybe half a second on a phone, maybe a thumb-pause, and then gone. 

As a writer who has spent the last decade in this industry, who has seen the highs of being one of the most valued voices in the room and the lows of being set aside, I couldn't help but relate to the film in more than one way. I went in expecting an ode to fashion, and I came out relating to it on a far more personal level than I had imagined.

What stings about this particular bit is that neither Andy nor Nigel did anything wrong. They put in the years and got good at their jobs, only to find that the audience they worked so hard for doesn't exist anymore.   

When Runway's parent company gets a new owner, the first department on the chopping block is features, Andy's department. "Retail is the only part of luxury fashion that still makes money," Emily explains in the film, having long since defected to Dior. 

The market still wants the products, but it just doesn't seem to want the people who give these products actual meaning. When did we decide that people behind the scenes who make luxury feel like more than a price tag are no longer needed?

The modern world has been transformed by two trends: collapsing attention spans and exploding content volume on the production side.

If you think Nigel was being dramatic about the half-second scroll, these numbers will sober you up.

And then there's the other side of the equation: how much content is actually out there.

Put plainly, people making content are producing more of it faster than ever with the help of various apps and tools, while the people consuming it are giving any single piece about forty seconds before swiping on. 

This means that Nigel's carefully composed photograph is competing with a hundred million other images for that forty-second window, and Andy's reported feature is competing with an AI summary that will be read instead of her piece without linking it back to her. 

Studio films do not usually raise arguments about labor displacement, AI saturation, and the collapse of creative careers, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 does.

There is a subplot in which a billionaire suitor, Benji Barnes, proposes buying Runway and turning it into an AI-driven publication that will no longer require photographers, models, or, eventually, clothes. 

At this suggestion, we see Miranda horror-stricken, and the film treats the proposal as a worst-case scenario, which it is, but it is also a fairly accurate description of where the publishing industry already is.

AI models have already appeared in Vogue. Major publishers have begun replacing human reporters with synthetic ones, a trend tracked in detail by the Columbia Journalism Review's coverage of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the state of magazine journalism. 

Although the film mainly revolves around fashion and journalism, the argument it's making can be scaled to wider industry practices. For instance, software engineers who spent 15 years mastering their stack are being asked to use AI. 

Designers, writers, illustrators, translators, paralegals, and mid-level analysts, anyone whose value was supposed to come from depth of expertise, are being asked to compete with a system that approximates them for free. 

The Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index found that 80% of workers report not having enough time or energy to do their jobs effectively. 48% describe their work as "chaotic and fragmented." The World Economic Forum projects that 41% of companies worldwide expect to reduce their staff over the next five years because of AI.

The film does not solve any of this, and to be fair, it cannot. The happy ending is a billionaire rescue - the same kind of happy ending you get when a stay of execution counts as good news.

But maybe the rest of us can look up once in a while. Maybe we can hold our attention on something for longer than 47 seconds. Maybe Nigel's photograph deserves a real look, and Andy's piece deserves a real read, and the next time something creative comes up on our screens, we can try, just try, not to swipe.

About this piece: This is a cultural commentary essay on The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026), directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna. The film opened in US theaters on 1st May 2026.

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