Meryl Streep Is Dressing Better Than Miranda Priestly

Time will tell whether Valentino’s Rockstud heels – which made a presumably paid-for appearance on the feet of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada 2 – will catch on among today’s fashion editors, but one thing is certain: the most powerful woman working at the most powerful fashion magazine in the world would not be wearing so much baggy, greige tailoring. That moment passed long ago, having already trickled down through the collections of influencer brands like Maebe. What she would be wearing, though, is Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel, which this past season saw hundreds of editors queue in Paris for shoes in colours they did not even want. This is, mercifully, something Streep’s stylist seems to understand, dressing the actor in the brand for The Devil Wears Prada 2’s Tokyo premiere.

Granted, the film was made before Blazy showed his first collection, but Streep’s knitted Métiers d’Art skirt suit nonetheless feels right, because it is precisely the sort of thing the wicked witch of publishing conglomerate Elias-Clark might plausibly wear in 2026. Not, say, a dowdy pair of high-waisted trousers and a pleated blouse beneath a flimsy trench, with those overcompensating, “I’m a boss” rolled-up sleeves. I can’t help but imagine how that particular number will slip and puddle and curl off the edge of her assistant Simone Ashley’s desk – rather than thwack – as the Dennis Basso furs and Fendi coats once did when tossed at Andy Sachs. Even the leopard-print Givenchy by Sarah Burton she wore heading into The Late Show with Stephen Colbert this past week had more heft. Priestley always dressed with heft.

“It was like watching a documentary,” Anne Hathaway’s stylist Erin Walsh said of the original film’s wardrobe. “All of the assistants at the office were talking about it – and all of the bosses, too.” And yet, from what I have seen in the trailers, I can responsibly tell you that the sequel is not. There is no anthropology here, none of the grit that even today’s clackers look for in clothes, but rather a musical-comedy version (which already exists) of what power dressing looks like in fashion’s most cloistered corridors. Priestly, the impervious queen, no longer looks like the most powerful woman working at the most powerful fashion magazine, but the most powerful woman at a middling fashion PR agency. Costume designed by the same team behind And Just Like That…, it is perhaps no surprise that the drab, boardroom-bound Miranda Priestly now looks more like Miranda Hobbes.