A Million Girls Would Kill for This Job
in "The Devil Wears Prada."
Intro
One of the best scenes in The Devil Wears Prada happens around the middle of the movie. We watch Emily and another woman laugh about Andy’s frumpy clothes and complete ignorance around beauty. Cut to the door opens to make way for knee-high boots that slowly reveal a face befitting a Runway Fashion magazine. I’ve watched this movie about a million times but that is a scene I will never get bored of. All thanks to the build up of the story line before.
“A Million Girls Would Kill For This Job”
Andrea (aka Andy) walks into her job interview at Runway Fashion magazine, wide-eyed, completely clueless, yet determined to own the position as Miranda Priestly’s new assistant. As a recent college grad struggling to find a prestigious job in journalism, this is her shot. If she can keep a job at one of the most prestigious fashion magazines in the world, any journalism paper would have her.
However, Runway’s cutthroat and high-stress culture, her coworker Emily, and her boss Miranda Priestly don’t make assimilation easy. Immediately, she is thrown into endless working hours, sent on a million errands, and answering constant phone calls. Her rigorous workload and the stress it causes her to throw off the delicate balance of her romantic partnership with aspiring chef Nate and all of her friends.
The film does an excellent job of balancing Andy’s time between work and her personal life, as both serve as a gauge to measure her metamorphosis. Her interpersonal relationships with her friends and boyfriend help remind the audience who Andy was and she is slowly but surely becoming. Her coworkers Emily and Nigel and her boss Miranda Priestly represent the hostile workplace posing an antagonizing force against her personal life. But they also offer an alternative future for her. A future that she could excel in…at a cost.
Andy’s attempts to remain true to who she is are slowly eroded by Miranda’s torturously high standards and expectations. She finds herself ripped apart by her steady, quiet yet cold tone at every failure to meet them. The straw that breaks the camel's back is when she fails to find Miranda on a flight out of Florida during an awful hurricane. Despite sacrificing a precious night out with her father to do so, the fact that Miranda had to miss her twin daughter’s concert because of what she thought was Andy’s incompetence is just enough to slay her. After enduring her insults concerning her appearance and recent failure she runs to the comforts of Nigel, one of the only friends she’s managed to make. But instead, he gives her another lecture. Nigel’s monologue of Andrea’s disrespect and disregard of Runway culture and fashion’s contributions to society marks the film's turning point, when Andy decides that if you can’t beat em, you join em.
Now is a good time to point out the importance of the film’s majority-female cast and female-adjacent setting. But unlike many projects today it doesn’t make it’s casting the entire point of the film but rather allows it to speak for itself. It also subtly addresses any misogynistic sentiments the audience may have towards its setting. Andy’s presence in the film represents the outside perspective of the fashion industry. Her entire life up until this point has probably been spent valuing her intelligence over her beauty, believing that attempts to do so make a person vain, shallow, and superficial. Therefore, compared to the more highly regarded male-represented academia, Andy and the audience look down on the fashion industry due to its preoccupation with appearance and arguably more intangible contributions to society.
The contrast between Andy’s beliefs surrounding fashion and beauty and Runway is pointed out in the “cerulean scene” in which Andy makes an off-handed comment about two blue belts that are being chosen to complete an outfit assembled by Miranda. In response, Miranda’s monologue details the history of the color of the belts being chosen and explains that the fashion industry isn’t just an isolated bubble full of haughty airheads, but part of a whole, influencing the clothes that show up on the red carpet to your local department store.
Here, it’s not just Andy Miranda is lecturing. It’s us. She educates us on the fact that the contributions of the fashion industry are anything but intangible and we are anything but isolated from its grasp. She points out the misogynistic disregard we have for this industry and tells us that its contributions are worthy of respect. Andy has been put in a position where she has been forced to work in a fashion magazine because no other publication will have her. Yet despite the professional leverage that the fashion industry offers, she still can’t find it in her heart to respect it. That arrogance and lack of appreciation is what Nigel points out during Andy’s breaking point and it’s why I don’t see Andy’s attempts to assimilate to Runway her becoming less than herself. Because if she’s going to survive this industry and reap the benefits it has to offer her professionally, the least she can do is figure out how to walk its walk and speak its language.
The Villain of This Story Is….
When Andy takes Nigel’s advice to heart she doesn’t just learn to dress better. She literally goes from not knowing how to spell Gabbana to being able to point out who designed the bag she wears to the party where she first meets Christian Thompson. But while she continues to excel at work, her friends seem picky about when and where they choose to be happy for her success. Nate only begins to cherish her new job after her glow up, but slowly begins to resent her as her work life begins to take up more and more of her time. Her friends only like her job when it means getting designer bags but not when she is forced to leave dinner to tend to a work request.
Their grumblings about her hectic schedule make even less sense when you consider their own professions. Her boyfriend works as a chef while her friend Lily works as a visual artist. Both careers are known for having long work hours in an attempt to scale the ladder and make ends meet. Both careers are known for having people willing to make many a sacrifice to achieve a smidge of success. You would think people who occupy these professions would be more understanding of Andy, especially since she only plans to work there for a year. If your friend had to give up one year of your relationship in order to obtain the experience necessary to set them up for success for potentially the remainder of their professional life, you would think a good friend or romantic partner would be more willing to make that sacrifice.
However, her job wasn’t a superb place either. Miranda continues to be demanding and relentless, setting up impossible tasks for Andy to complete. After she rescues Emily from a slip up during a work event, she is promoted to first assistant and is offered to go to Paris Fashion Week while Emily, who has spent all her year planning for this event, stays in the States. If she refuses the offer, she may find herself jobless.
To the tune of a heartbroken Emily, she attends and is swept away by the magic and romance of the city. It’s in Paris when we encounter the most emotional point of the film. When Andy is called into Miranda’s townhouse living room the camera cuts to a barefaced Miranda Priestly who has clearly been crying. It’s during this scene that we realize how Miranda’s own personal life has taken a hit in order to compensate for her wildly successful career. Her failure to maintain a relationship and a father for her twin girls is something that cuts deeper than any professional setback could seem to do. But when Andy asks if she would like the night off, Miranda ignores her, pulls herself together and continues working.
We now see the wizard under the curtain. The reason why Miranda is so abusive to her staff is because she is abusive to herself. Her demanding and taxing work ethic is a self inflicted wound that she’s managed to inflict on others around her. But we soon find that even though her job has cost her so much personally, it is something she will go to great lengths to keep.
The morning after a romantic night in Paris with Christian, Andy uncovers a plot to replace Miranda Priestly with her rival and editor in chief of French Runway, Jacqueline Follet. At that afternoon's banquet all guests are seated, some of those eagerly await her downfall. But while everyone else is playing checkers, Ms. Priestly is playing chess. In a dramatic and heartbreaking twist, Miranda reveals she’s been aware of this scheme the entire time and to avoid it, places Jacqueline in charge of fashion designer James Holt's new company instead of Nigel. She then used her numerous connections and loyalties in the fashion industry to convince her higher ups to let her stay on, threatening a mass exodus of her followers should she be removed. In the car ride with Andy she says that the reason why she orchestrated this move was for the good of the magazine. Apparently, there is no one who can do what Miranda can.
Although Miranda is talented, we know this isn’t the complete truth. The fact of the matter is, Miranda is Runway. She’s laid down her life to it, given up her personal life for it and it remains the only thing standing to show for all the work she’s done during her life. Losing her job at Runway would’ve been a massive loss of identity that Miranda may never have recovered from. With Nigel left without the opportunity to be independent from Runway which he has also given much of his life to, Andy is left disillusioned with both Miranda and the hustle culture that’s dominated her life for the past 5-6 months. She leaves Paris and goes off back to New York.
“My Biggest Disappointment”
The Andy we are left with is not the Andy we saw in the beginning or middle of the movie but a healthy mix of both. When she walks into her job interview at the New York Mirror, her stylish outfit a jarring display compared to the collared sweater wearing journalists surrounding her. The office is brown and plain with paper scattered all over desks, another far cry from the sleek modern interior of Runway. But when Andy shakes her prospective boss's hand and exhales nervously, you know that for the most part she’s back.
For a really long time, I saw the ending of this film as a sad one. Caught up in the glamor and the high of her success, I saw a woman who gave up a genuinely good opportunity to excel in a career that could’ve put her in an excellent professional position had she continued. But now that I’m older, I can recognize and accept its message.
Even though they were successful, every single person at Runway was miserable. In their attempts to find success, they lost empathy for those around them and did whatever it took to secure their own spot in a cutthroat industry. While I don’t completely take back what I said earlier about the lack of support Andy’s friends offered her, I can recognize that Runway was helping Andy become a person willing to lose her integrity to make it to the top. All at the expense of those she claimed to love and respect. The scary part is how unwilling she was to be honest with herself about it until Miranda pointed it out.
The movie also sends another clear message: corporate loyalty may not pay off and in your attempts to make it so, it may turn you into a person you don’t recognize in your attempts to make sure it does.
In the last scene, we watch Andy smiling at her old workplace and exchange a wave to Miranda who sits in a car, ready to move on to her next important meeting. Her positive reaction to her previous work experience shows her ability to integrate her angelic and demonic side into a whole and complete character and can recognize the value of both. When Miranda smiles to herself after Andy has left her for the final time, we see that despite her not completing her year long employment, she didn’t need to. Not did she get the job she wanted but she did what she thought was once impossible: impress The Miranda Priestly of Runway.
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