When a coterie of supermodels, actors, athletes and musicians swan their way up the carpeted steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday evening, many in the fashion industry and its spectators are likely to experience a sense of déjà vu.
That’s because the sequel to the “The Devil Wears Prada,” which comes out on Friday, will have just opened with an early scene set on the steps of another venerable New York City museum (the American Museum of Natural History), one that is being similarly mobbed by stars and photographers.
“There’s an expectation that the movie is going to be glamorous and fashionable, and a gala is kind of a shorthand to get us there,” David Frankel, the film’s director, said of the decision to reintroduce Miranda Priestly, the steely editor of a fictional fashion magazine, in the context of a faux Met Gala.
The weeks leading up to the real Met Gala, a starry fund-raiser for the museum’s self-financing Costume Institute, has been a whirlwind of cross-promotion, complete with sketches and editorial photo shoots aimed at elevating both the movie and the real-life publication that inspires it, Vogue. And all that synergy seems poised to result in the most meta Met Gala yet.
This year, the cover of Vogue’s May issue, which usually functions as a curtain raiser for the Met’s spring fashion exhibition, features a photo of the magazine’s longtime editor Anna Wintour alongside Meryl Streep, in costume as Wintour’s fictional alter ego.
“SEEING DOUBLE,” blares a cover line on the winking portrait, taken by Annie Leibovitz. “When Miranda Met Anna.”
The Vogue Book Club’s pick for April? You guessed it: “The Devil Wears Prada,” the 2003 novel by Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant of Wintour’s, that provided the source material for the first film. Weisberger also wrote a personal essay in which she reflects on the lasting appeal of the film and her portrayal of a boss who filled her with “abject terror.” (It, of course, ran in Vogue.) Five of the nine episodes that the magazine’s flagship podcast released in April tied back to the film. One even featured three of Wintour’s former assistants dishing on their experiences working for the publishing legend, who is now the global editorial director of all Vogue titles.
The magazine’s new top editor, Chloe Malle, has made no secret of her eagerness to play into anticipation of the new movie, which comes 20 years after the release of the first film.
“When the team at Vogue learned about the forthcoming sequel, we all felt strongly that Disney shouldn’t be allowed to have all the fun,” Malle wrote in her May editor’s letter. “‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ conveniently hits theaters the weekend before the Met Gala, so if we wanted a cover tied to the film, it would need to be May’s.”
Vogue and Disney, which owns 20th Century Studios, the film’s distributor, have collaborated “on the marketing of the movie,” Frankel said. According to a representative for Vogue, the magazine’s partnership with Disney took the form of paid advertisements on their platform and advance screenings of the film, and the magazine’s writers and editors were not paid to promote the film. Representatives for Disney had no comment on Thursday.
It wasn’t always such a lovefest between the magazine and the film. When “The Devil Wears Prada” was released in 2006, many in the fashion world smarted at the portrayal of editors, designers and assistants as haughty and complicated egotists whose behavior, in 2026, could easily land them on the wrong side of human resources.
The handling of the Miranda character — a towering magazine editor whose power and influence has the ability to shape a designer’s career — was enough to spook many fashion insiders into refusing to be associated with the film.
“People were very nervous about offending Anna Wintour, and so cooperation from fashion brands and from designers was severely limited,” Frankel said. “It was often just a flat-out no. There were a couple people who spoke to us on background and said, ‘Don’t mention my name anywhere in your movie or around your movie.’”
The recent change in attitude appears to be due, in part, to Vogue’s embrace of the film, and the sequel is populated with industry figures playing themselves. Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor and writer of the Fresh Hell newsletter; Vanessa Friedman, The New York Times’s chief fashion critic; and Donatella Versace all make appearances, helping the film blur the line between reality and fiction. Did Frankel consider a Wintour cameo in the sequel? “There’s, like, even limits to our meta-ness,” he said.
Won’t the endorsement of the establishment deprive the sequel of the bite of the first? Not according to Frankel, who insists that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is focused less on the fashion industry itself and more on the demise of print journalism.
Last year, Vogue announced that it would release eight issues per year, timed to major cultural moments, a departure from its monthly print cadence. Vogue’s website also absorbed Teen Vogue and Vogue Business. Several plotlines in the new movie center on the challenges facing legacy media organizations like Vogue and its fictional counterpart, Runway.
“Publishing has definitely not gotten any better,” said Amy Odell, the founder of Back Row, a fashion newsletter and podcast, and the author of a 464-page Anna Wintour biography. The Vogue cover and other tie-ins with the magazine are, for Odell, signs that Condé Nast “seems to be increasingly in the business of viral moments.”
The Met Gala is one of those viral moments. The fund-raiser is widely considered to be the equivalent of the Super Bowl for the fashion industry and regularly brings in tens of millions of dollars to the Costume Institute.
So when stars make their entrances on Monday, showing off their takes on the evening’s “Fashion Is Art” dress code, they will be riffing — consciously or unconsciously — on a memorable defense of the fashion industry’s importance, delivered by Stanley Tucci in the first movie: “What they created was greater than art, because you live your life in it.”
Yola Mzizi is a reporter for The Times covering fashion and style.
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