"Remember when magazines were a thing?"

The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the death throes of the media business

Early in the Devil Wears Prada 2, Anne Hathaway’s character Andy and her colleagues are laid off from their fictional newspaper by text message. Watching it in the cinema, I felt my gut lurch. Like most journalists, I’ve seen many friends laid off in recent years — never by text, but in at least one case by email. I’ve also taken redundancy myself. (At this stage, who hasn’t?) So if you’re a normal person, going into this movie expecting a light, nostalgia-laden sequel to a beloved 2000s comedy, then sure, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that. Enjoy! But if you’re in the media business, a word of warning: I found the viewing experience close to how I imagine veterans feel watching war movies. You don’t know, man. You weren’t there.

This time around, former Runway assistant Andy is an award-winning reporter, headhunted back to a glossy fashion magazine to be its new features editor. (Been there.) But Runway is a ghost of its former self. “The September issue is already so thin you could floss with it,” Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly laments. Fashion editor Nigel, played beautifully again by Stanley Tucci, is even more brutal. “Runway stopped being a magazine years ago,” he explains. “We still have a book, but nobody buys it.” Instead the former cultural titan is now just “content, that people scroll past while they…” (He’s too polite to say “poo”.) The drama this time around is not centred on something so antiquated as making a magazine, but rather an attempt trying to save magazines entirely.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking a lot about magazines lately. There’s been a lot of churn in magazine world: editors moving around, legendary figures pushing cushy memoirs about the glory days, more titles closing. I can’t remember when it happened, but I recently noticed that when big jobs change hands, the first thing friends now gossip about is not whom they’ll hire first, but who they’ll get rid of.

More than 3,000 journalists in the UK and US lost their jobs last year. (That figure is actually down, from more than 3,800 in 2024.) The list of media companies affected is a roll call of both new media startups and respected institutions: The Washington Post, The London Evening Standard, People, Business Insider, The Daily Mail, the BBC, and yes, pretty much all of the major magazine houses. There are few jobs left for those let go. A few days ago, colleagues who had published for the legendary but recently shuttered fashion bible The Face had to scramble to save their stories before they were scrubbed from the internet forever.

We all know that media is screwed. Exactly how screwed, though, has rarely been so honestly depicted in pop culture. In TDWP2, the once imperious Priestly is now grovelling to advertisers, who dictate the contents of the magazine to her. “No them, no us,” a broken Priestly says, quoting conversations I’ve heard in the real world countless times. Stories are judged not on merit or cultural impact, but solely on web traffic. When the younger scion of the publishing family that owns Runway takes over, the cuts are savage: no more town cars, no business class flights, and layoffs for everyone who has been at the company longer than five years. I don’t know who did their research, but apart from the flights thing (the real Miranda Priestly would never fly coach) it all feels tragically on the money.¹

Even the film’s central plot — which, spoilers, involves a plan to get a recently looksmaxxed tech oligarch to buy Runway as a gift for his fashion-obsessed partner — might as well have been ripped straight out of Puck’s media column. (The first thing that partner wants to do is put herself on the cover. Who could imagine such a thing?)

The Devil Wears Prada 2 seems to be asking: what even is a magazine, anymore? Are they worth saving? It’s a reasonable thing to ask. Different journalists will give you different answers, and those answers will likely touch on a few clichés: about taste, about storytelling, about community, about quality. They certainly stopped being about printed pages years ago.²

The reality is that we’re all Miranda Priestly now. The editorial decision-making depicted in the original 2006 Devil Wears Prada — the ruthless enforcement of Miranda’s personal taste — now happens invisibly every time we touch our phone screens. The imagery in glossy magazines like Runway didn’t disappear, it just migrated to Instagram, where it can be found in near infinite supply, to fit whatever your mood might be at any moment. (Magazines, in turn, became essentially production houses for expensive celebrity Instagram shoots.) The stories in the “book” are no longer consumed as part of a carefully curated editorial mix, but splintered into interchangeable pieces of “content”, and spewed at us through social media feeds and Apple News, where they mix interchangeably with AI slop, scammers, politicians, influencers, and Substackers writing for free after hours.

This is what business analysts call the great “unbundling” — it’s happened in movies and music too. Old-school magazine publishers responded to these disruptions largely by clinging ever more-slavishly to the whims of a handful of luxury advertisers. But, as the film deftly captures, those advertisers only ever cared about magazines to the extent they delivered eyeballs, and quickly jumped ship as soon as they saw the iceberg coming. (Runway, one character jokes, is less an institition worth saving than “the last piece of wood floating next to the Titanic.” Ouch.)

So, what is a magazine, anymore? The Devil Wears Prada 2 struggles to deliver a convincing answer. The only story that Andy actually gets to go viral is a soft-serve interview with said tech bro’s reclusive ex-wife. The climax of the film hinges not on a story, or even a cover, but a glossy fashion show-slash-concert that Runway is hosting in Milan. In one brief monologue, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna makes a vague case for magazines as a hub for a broader community of artists: the designers, photographers, musicians, and other creatives whose human-made work is celebrated in a title like Runway. And McKenna is partly right — one of my favourite things about working in magazines is the ability for editors to wield them as a spotlight, to elevate individuals whose work is interesting, or valuable, or newsworthy. One of the most tragic failures of the traffic-led era of journalism is the fundamental loss of this function. Magazines no longer shape taste such as chase it desperately, which is part of the reason why so many feel interchangeable.

Perhaps, I’m delusional, but I think I know that the 2006 Miranda Priestly would say: that Runway was not just about taste, it was about excellence. Miranda is a gatekeeper, a snob. She will only stand for the best photographers, the best styling, the best writing. That, not just eyeballs, is why luxury publishers wanted to be associated with a bygone era of magazines. They were like the designers they covered: artists, or at least artisans, interested in the construction of a particularly idiosyncratic form of literary-visual art.

The luxury industry knows that making art costs money. Rather than dilute themselves, the successful houses ramped up prices, becoming even more exclusive, but lost little of their cultural currency. Media brands mostly did the opposite, giving their product away for free, cranking up output while cutting quality, eventually becoming the equivalent of Andy’s fast-fashion cerulean jumper — a thin facsimile of the original.

The truth is that few magazines have ever been a mass-market product. They’re niche things, the weird expression of a few like-minded obsessives who believe in the importance words and images, and band together every month to try to say something with them. (In this sense, magazines are less like newspapers and more like books; book publishing at least knows what it’s selling.) Magazine brands’ constant “pivots” to new verticals — video, affiliate links, podcasts, events, video again — have almost uniformly failed largely because they have lacked conviction. It’s like Donatella Versace launching a condiment line; novel, but fundamentally the taste isn’t there.

Weirdly, although it’s a bleak time for the industry, I find that comforting. In this moment of peak content and AI slop, where everyone is shouting for you to read their newsletter or subscribe to their channel or buy their dropshipped merch, I find magazines quietly reassuring. Harper’s, National Geographic, Aeon, Vittles, The Atlantic, WIRED, The Guardian Long Read, Private Eye — there are still great magazines out there, albeit with tiny teams, still producing beautiful stories and pictures against the odds. Places where you can block out the noise, AI garbage, and your relapsing screen-time addiction, to be entertained, inspired, and crucially, informed about something new.

Perhaps, as Miranda Priestly might say, you might think that the convulsions facing the magazine industry are nothing to do with you. But, to quote a famous editor, the decline of the magazine business represents millions of dollars, and countless jobs. And there’s still something to be said about putting your trust in the hands of a group of obsessive artists, who dedicate their lives to making choices for you in small rooms, producing art…out of a pile of stuff.

1. I enjoyed Louis Staples describing the proto-girlboss politics of the original as “a broken promise to millenials”.

2. I love magazines, but even I only get maybe half a dozen a month in print any more, and I’d guess I’m in the 0.1% of hardcore fans.