The Devil Wears Prada workplace: Toxic or timeless?

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

NIGEL: This place, where so many people would die to work, you only deign to work. And you want to know why she doesn’t kiss you on the forehead and give you a gold star on your homework at the end of the day. Wake up, sweetheart.

BOB SAFIAN: Hey everyone, Bob here. Today we have a special, super fun episode about the iconic movie The Devil Wears Prada. As a new sequel hits theaters, we’re exploring the enduring impact and business lessons of the now 20-year-old original. I brought in two leaders with deep experience in publishing fashion and entertainment who dish with me about careers, ambition, the definition of success and more, plus some personal stories about the magazine industry that you’re not going to want to miss, so let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

Today, we’re going to have twice the fun because I’m joined by two guests, Janice Min, CEO of The Ankler and former Editor of The Hollywood Reporter and Us Weekly; and Sarah Ball, Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Magazine, formerly at GQ and Vanity Fair. Janice, Sarah, great to have you both back on the show.

JANICE MIN: Thanks for having me.

SARAH BALL: Thank you for having us.

Copy LinkHow the movie captured the peak power of publishing and fashion

SAFIAN: Yeah. So we’re here to talk about the business and cultural lessons of the iconic film, The Devil Wears Prada, as the sequel hits theaters. The original film revolves around Andy, a nerdy, earnest, recent journalism school grad played by Anne Hathaway, who lands a job as an assistant to Miranda Priestly, the devil in question played by Meryl Streep. Miranda’s editor in chief of fashion magazine Runway, which is a playoff of Vogue and its iconic leader, Anna Wintour. I want to start with your personal relationships to the original movie. Sarah, when you joined Vanity Fair, you were joining the same company that housed the devil, Anna Wintour, both Vanity Fair and Vogue are owned by Condé Nast. Did you relate to Anne Hathaway’s character as a young newcomer to the company?

BALL: I think that anybody who has been entry level at Condé Nast does relate to Andy. And certainly, the original film was filmed in part, the turnstiles are the same that were actual at old 4 Times Square at Condé Nast. So the literal process of getting into the building on your first day is similar in real life as it was for Andy in the film.

SAFIAN: That was your life.

BALL: That was my life. I mean, I was a little bit different. I had been a reporter at a news magazine and joined Vanity Fair in 2010. Those earnest clips that she’s bustling with, I had those. I definitely was that person, but I had had a couple of years of professional experience before, so that gave me a little more of my sea legs. But certainly looking around the Condé Nast cafeteria that is in the film and seeing these exotic creatures in all kinds of interpretations of work attire, that was a new… I had come from a real newsroom environment of yelling each other’s last name and gruff deadline behavior and coming to Condé was, I experienced it through very similar eyes.

SAFIAN: So Janice, when The Devil Wears Prada came out, you were editor in chief of Us Weekly, so you were the devil in your own newsroom when it came out. Yes.

MIN: I was the devil. And I did wear Prada, but I will say… But for anyone who worked in publishing at the time, there was a world of difference between working for Jann Wenner versus working at Condé Nast. Jann Wenner ran a pretty down and dirty company, which would probably seem incredibly flush by today’s standards. You could still go downstairs and there’s a line of black cars waiting there to take magazine people home.

SAFIAN: This is pre-Uber days, right?

MIN: Pre-Uber.

SAFIAN: You had to have some way to get a car home, yeah.

MIN: Yes. And obviously pre-publishing collapse. But I remember at one point, Jann trying to convert that into taking a cab and people, I mean, “Oh my God, you’re going to make us take cabs?” And that was pretty shocking stuff.
But the movie when it came out because we were working so inside the business, you knew what was an exaggeration and what actually wasn’t an exaggeration. It was an era of gatekeepers that its last gasp was probably that era about to collapse maybe a few years after the movie came out.

SAFIAN: The original film brought in over $300 million at the box office globally on a modest $35 million budget. Meryl Streep won a Golden Globe Award, got an Oscar nomination. Do you guys remember, was the film highly anticipated at the time or was it a surprise?

BALL: Obviously, the book was a huge bestseller and had really saturated the culture. The film quite famously toned down a little bit of the maybe vitriol or the devilness of the devil, and it did have a little bit of a glancing sympathy for what it’s like to be inside the publishing industry and gave the viewer that rubbernecker sense of looking inside of these glamorous institutions as opposed to more focus on the degradation of being the assistant. It included more than excluded people who wanted to be party to the fashion industry, the costumes, the montage of her coats that still endures in the culture. And that was like Sex and the City peaking and the dawn of the Sex and the City movies, so it was like the opulence of the costumes I think also played into the bigness of that hit.

MIN: This was an era in the business sense of mid-budget movies. You could do a $35 million movie and have an enormous hit that starred all women and plus Stanley Tucci. That seems almost like some fantastical dream today. I think to Sarah’s point, Manhattan was it in that decade. It was the place to be, it seemed super exciting. A lot of this was fueled by Sex and the City, and this dream of one day you’re going to come to New York and have a job in one of these very, very glamorous industries and you will make it, and you’ll date Adrian Granier from Entourage, which is another relic of that decade. He did not make it back for the sequel. I think it was a fantasy when I think probably people who are starting in their careers felt like there still were career fantasies, which is very different from, I think how young people are viewing the job market right now.

Copy LinkWhat fear based leadership once accomplished and why it no longer works

SAFIAN: So alongside the storytelling elements, The Devil Wears Prada is a business movie about work and ambition and what it takes to succeed. So I want to take you through some key scenes and see what sort of lessons we can pull out of them. You mentioned Stanley Tucci’s character, Nigel. The first is the gird your loin scenes, right? That’s what Nigel says right before Meryl Streep’s character first enters her office and everyone’s running around in a panic.

NIGEL: All right everyone, gird your loins.

SAFIAN: The energy is fear, right? Miranda is the villain. Fear is a little bit out of style as a leadership stance these days where there’s more avuncular Tim Cook than brash Steve Jobs, although Donald Trump certainly leans into it. Is the message of this scene that fear is good, a motivator or capricious?

BALL: First of all, the phrase gird your loins has become… So many lines from this film have become their own little memes, their own little taglines. The day that Chloé Malle, who is a friend who also came up through Condé, got her now positioned running American Vogue and I texted her congratulations and she wrote back, “Gird your loins,” as a cheeky response. And I just think that’s the level of sitcom, funny clam that that gird your loins line has. She obviously meant it as an enormous joke.
I think that it’s meant to convey the personality driven enterprise that is runway under Miranda Priestly, that it’s one point of view. There’s one captain of this ship and we’re in service of that. And there’s a sense of fear of going up, you see the models and staffers diving out of the elevators if Miranda’s stepping into the elevator. So yes, I think it’s meant to evoke the kind of theatrics that went into producing this thing that is one person’s point of view. And there’s so many reasons why that has fractured as a workable model for publishing, and why the fear-based workplace is no longer in vogue, so to speak, pun partially intended.

MIN: It was a real testament to the cults of personality that used to form around editors, and that was almost like a job requirement of being a well-regarded editor because people were hiring you to run a publication because they wanted it to have your vision of the world imparted on it. And through that cult of personality around a well-regarded editor, advertisers would come, you could hold events, that you could hire the right people. No one cares about editors anymore. Nobody cares. And so I think if you fast-forward to today, it’s a little bit founder vibes. You have cults of personality around founders around Silicon Valley. I mean, I presume when Elon Musk walks onto the SpaceX campus in Texas, some people are probably sweating it out. And I’m not sure if there are a lot of other industries that have that anymore.

SAFIAN: Leadership in general feels like there are some places where you have your Elon Musks, but at most places, people feel a lot more comfortable challenging what the boss is telling them, and bosses maybe want to be liked a little bit more than they did then.

MIN: Yeah. Well, I mean, Sarah worked in a company where it’s commonplace where you have an employee meeting and it’s recorded and then leaked out to the media. I mean, these are unthinkable things from that era. And as part of that, I think as illustrated by the first Devil Wears Prada, I think people who worked in certain jobs swallowed a lot of humiliation along the way in order to toe the line.

BALL: Right. There’s so many more mechanisms for accountability. We see now stories about toxic work environments. They’re quickly held accountable and dissected with long investigations. There’s leaking of meetings, there’s screenshotting Slacks, employees obviously rejecting anything that goes into a toxic, abrasive work environment, and rightfully so.

SAFIAN: I was noticing rewatching the movie, the body shaming in the movie isn’t subtle. I mean, they call Andy the smart fat girl. That language might get you canceled today, right?

MIN: Beyond cancel.

BALL: Yeah.

MIN: I mean, I have friends who have worked at Vogue, and they have said to me they’ve never been so hungry in their life. I mean, that was certainly, I think, a part, not just a Vogue, but a fashion culture. And an expectation, the iconic people of fashion, Carolyn Bessette or Kate Moss, these were people whose one of their “best qualities,” was being this waifish, thin, rail thin woman.

SAFIAN: Is the vibe about that different in the fashion industry now, Sarah?

BALL: Shortly after the film came out, there was this enormous surge of a reckoning the body positivity movement. We’re going to move towards size inclusivity, then there have been challenges with that. And again, holding both brands and publications to account about size diversity. And you’ve seen all of many fashion publications move through that time. And then now we’re in the GLP-1, how GLP-1s have influenced that conversation is really interesting and still happening in live time.

Obviously, there is the fashion industry being built on the modeling industry, which is very still centered around aesthetics and still you see a lot of not only slim, but also unusually 6’3″ women who are very trim from around the world coming down runways. I think the conversation has become more self-aware around representation and it is a consideration for fashion publications and fashion photographers. And it is not as certainly as the abusive overtones of the first film.
You do see a huge TikTok trend. I’m sure you guys have seen this of models from the 2000s talking about the ways they were sent home from shoots and just drop shipped back home because they couldn’t be seen and they needed to hide until they were trimmer. This goes to, again, the Victoria’s Secret runway show being enormously popular and the workouts to get slim for Victoria’s Secret. All of that aughts culture now looks very retro, but as to whether we’ve completely grown out of it, I think no, again, I just think it’s become more about the Ozempic factor and what is in [inaudible 00:13:48] is actively in debate.

MIN: I think the fact that we even have the conversation at all is huge progress. I think infamously there was that 60 Minutes interview with Anna Wintour. I believe it was in that decade where she was asked a question about, I think, overweight people, fat people might’ve been the term that was used and she said something disparaging and that was completely fine, and that was completely acceptable in that era. And so today, if you had that sort of interview, that editor, that boss would’ve been coached in a million different ways, would’ve been so prepped. Every harsh corner would’ve been sanded down where that phrase would’ve never been said.

BALL: No, it’s the famous, the part that’s the beginning when you’re introduced to Meryl and she’s like, “Is there no tall slim paratrooper in the army that I can feature?” And you realize it’s not just the fashion coverage, it’s also all the-

MIN: That’s right.

BALL: That they were upholding an aesthetic standard across the news, which is also just mind-blowing to think about.

Copy LinkHow fashion enforced narrow ideals and why the industry is still reckoning with them

SAFIAN: Let me go to another scene from the film. The next key scene for me is what I call the cerulean scene. This is where Miranda basically mops the floor with Andy. She breaks down how this frumpy blue sweater that Andy is wearing demonstrates the power and the intellect and the influence of the fashion business. It’s just this shake you up moment.

Miranda: It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.

SAFIAN: Looking back on this now, what does this scene say to you guys?

BALL: This scene is one of the… It’s a real truth of this film, that there was, at the time, and still in vestigial pockets exists, a top-down dictation of certain taste codes that then go through the fashion ecosystem, which is a global business. I believe it is an explanatory didactic monologue to explain exactly why Vogue, why there wasn’t just arbitrary self-decreed power, but the kind of power in Miranda’s mind that she’s giving herself is that she is leading not just this team of taste makers, but she’s leading a global industry. And there really was truth to some of that at the time, and there are main aspects of the industry for which this is true, and the symbiotic relationship between editorial fashion shoots and what’s featured in them, and advertising fashion shoots and what products are popularized among people.

SAFIAN: And this idea that fashion trickles down from a handful of taste makers. I mean, is that still true in a social media world?

MIN: No.

SAFIAN: It’s over.

MIN: This is all bottom up now, right? And this is where gatekeepers are struggling. Gatekeepers sit on top of, I don’t want to say a diminishing group of people, but they’re sitting on top of a audience that likes the idea of curation and what they’re receiving, whereas anyone Gen Z and younger is not waiting for me or Sarah to tell them how to think or what to feel or what to buy.

BALL: The tastemakers are different. They still exist in the ecosystem. I’m producing this handbag, I’m seeding it to some influencers. People are seeing them on the arms of influencers. They are then creating that demand and want. It’s no longer me walking down the street with a bag or spotlight.

MIN: I mean, Sarah, I mean, wouldn’t an example of this be, and you can correct me if I got this wrong, but even vintage Coach bags, which were not a thing that any editor put forth. It was not in the pages of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, and then suddenly everyone wants a vintage Coach bag.

BALL: A complete bottom up. I think where it’s fascinating is to see then Coach and Stuart Vevers interpret some of that enthusiasm and speak to that Gen Z customer and realize, wow, there’s real enthusiasm here and we’re going to create designs that speak to a young customer. You watch that happen. But it is exactly to Janice’s point, it is bottom up, and this started not long after the film came out at some of these publications putting… Moving past the model cover into the celebrity cover, and then moving past the celebrity cover.

MIN: Yes.

BALL: Into the Kate Upton, Kim Kardashian, Lauren Sánchez Bezos into this figment of popular culture cover that isn’t really particularly an actor, actress, director, slim female paratrooper elected official that represents the people have spoken and they are dying to see.

SAFIAN: Gird your loins and grab your blue sweaters, we’re only getting started. Still to come, the Met Gala, Paris Fashion Week, and what Andy really learns by the end of the movie, we’ll be right back.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Janice Min of The Ankler and Sarah Ball of WSJ Magazine dished about enduring lessons from The Devil Wears Prada, and what’s changed since the film came out. Now, we talk about the Met Gala scene from the movie, Paris Fashion Week, and what the impact of the sequel might be. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkWhat paying your dues used to mean and why younger workers expect different boundaries

I want to go deeper into the boss-assistant relationship in the movie. Once Andy embraces the job and decides to give it her all, her boundaries fall, right? She takes calls from Miranda at all hours. She misses her boyfriend’s birthday. She takes on the impossible, whether it’s a flight home in a hurricane or an unpublished Harry Potter manuscript. It’s this vibe there that you, in the movie that you start out by paying your dues, right? It’s this traditional trade-off of you have to give up your life to advance and to learn. That need, that message for new generations seems like maybe it’s shifting a little bit.

MIN: Well, I think it’s that line you get when you interview someone where they’ll say, “Life-work balance is really important to me.” And that’s fine. Go for it. And I think that is a different expectation of people of work that people would’ve had in 2006 when you were trying to make it in, let’s say, the publishing industry. That’s a very different expectation.

BALL: I agree with that. There’s a kind of boundaries around the workday. At the same time, you’re still responding out of hours. I think that the way that it’s expressed at that era and that time was that the only way to show passion and interest and the way to box out all of these competitors and these crowded fields is to be at my desk 24/7, and if not, we’re going to find another disposable person to put at the desk 24/7. I think.

MIN: Right, because there are going to be 1,000 grinders who would take your spot in a second.

BALL: Right. This is a smaller industry than it used to be. These publishing teams are smaller, and the basement on entry level work has risen in skillset. And so there isn’t just this, “Oh, you have to be as a body sitting there answering the phone and running around with stuff.” I think that you’re asking this person to be more skilled, and with that comes more of the shape of a day that follows the shape of a professional’s day.

SAFIAN: The kind of work burden that Andy is under, which in some ways people today would be even more aghast at, like, “No, I’m not going to work that way.” But at the same time, that job wouldn’t even exist, right?

MIN: No. I mean, you certainly could not justify in your organization hiring someone who will pick cranberries out of your salad, or go be responsible for getting you coffee all day.

BALL: The dog.

MIN: Yeah, the dog, Right. That just would not possibly happen. I had worked for an editor once before I became an editor in chief who had the assistant run out her stool sample to the doctor, and that was… I mean, everyone in the office was aghast, but you certainly weren’t going to say a thing about it. You were almost like the personal handmaiden to the editor if you were in that job, whether you were male or female, and you were at the beck and call at all times. And that was in a weird way, the expectation of the job. And I think in the decade after Devil Wears Prada, HR teams became very invested in assistants can’t do your personal work for you. They can’t plan your kids’ birthday party. You can’t have them go pick up your dry cleaning. And I think those boundaries were not in effect until there was enough ground swell and the culture shifted to put those into effect.

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SAFIAN: I mean, this handmaiden phrasing that you have, if you think about it in professional terms, it makes me think about the Met Gala scene in the movie. I mean, the Met Gala itself is, if anything, a bigger deal today culturally, but Andy’s there with Miranda, and she’s whispering this critical information about a guest into Miranda’s ear.

ANDY: It’s Ambassador Franklin, and that’s the woman that he left his wife for, Rebecca.

SAFIAN: I’ve heard business folks reference this scene as this, “Oh, is this a superpower that AI could deliver to me one day?” It’s like-

MIN: Well, I think you’re so important, you don’t need to know who any of the little people are. You are the most important. Everyone knows who you are, you don’t need to know who they are, but the handmaiden certainly better know who every single one of those people is and better not screw it up.

BALL: That’s one of the more legitimate business uses of Andy in that she’s there. You show her advantage suddenly professionally by knowing the world, getting to know the players, knowing this is an important donor, knowing this is an important executive and surprised that they’re here. And that to me is her as chief of staff, which is a modern, more contemporary version. When she’s got the surfboards for spring break and knocking over the crowd, I think that feels like the archaic version. But you think about the Vanity, where I was, the Vanity Fair Cannes party that was such a big deal and it lives on. Dario Amodei of Anthropic, he’s going to need somebody whispering in who this Hollywood crowd is, that still I think is a live active thing, which are these scenes of power, these kind of publishing could create these enclaves.

Copy LinkHow fashion week evolved from editor driven spectacle to influencer fueled power stage

SAFIAN: So the climax of the movie comes at Paris Fashion Week. There’s so much business gravitas attributed to that moment, although I have had some guests on the show argue that Fashion Week isn’t what it used to be. What does the movie’s depiction of Fashion Week say about the industry then and the industry now?

BALL: The makeover of Fashion Week, it doesn’t resemble what it used to. It’s still quite a big scene. It still is the case that you go to a show in Milan and Paris, it is a red carpet. It is hoards of people on stadiums taking photos. It’s going through a tunnel, it’s fearing you’re going to be trampled in a stampede. It is glamorous. There is a front row. There are celebrities. There are flash bulbs going off. It is like an award show. It’s certainly not, oh, it’s just modest and retiring now. It’s just… No, if anything, these luxury brands have so much invested in a luxury turnaround that they’ve become even more circusy. The front row is filled with influencers. It’s filled with a new level of celebrity, and editors are there, but they’re maybe shunted over into more of a corner so that these celebrities can have front row seat.

MIN: Well, can we talk about Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez showing up to Fashion Week, and you’re whatever, top three wealthiest people in the world, and this is where you’re choosing to spend your time? And that reveals the power of Fashion Week. You want to go where the flash bulbs are, right? They are not subtle people. It used to be, it would be Upper East Side socialites who would come fly into Paris, and now it’s tech oligarchs and their spouses. Part of where we are in culture, where everyone’s looking in their own life for tent pole moments, that everything has gone IRL. When you could stream fashion shows, people are like, “Ah, no one’s going to go anymore.” But in fact, the opposite has occurred that something, the social clout you have from being there, from being in the room, from being photographed is still irreplaceable.

BALL: The security is so heightened because there are people who crash, who can copy a QR code, who can try to hack their way in so now it is incredibly intense to get in. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan were also at their first front row show together this year, they were at Prada. So what’s different is an editor, an editor in chief is not making that connection. The brand and the tech company are often either in business together occasionally, or they’re directly in contact, and I think what you’re seeing is those publications don’t need to marry those two industries together in the same way as in the film, the list, the sense that it’s all being held together by a publication is not true.

Copy LinkWhat Andy gains from a brutal boss and how ambition changes over time

SAFIAN: At the end of the movie, Andy decides that to stay true to herself, she has to move on, but she also appreciates Miranda kind of unexpectedly. And I wonder what you feel about this takeaway because part of it, it’s like dealing with the slings and arrows of a tough workplace is valuable learning, she got something out of it, but ultimately we should all follow our soul, and that means not being seduced by money and power.

MIN: Publishing was an amazing place for women. It was one of the first industries where you saw women rise to the top, and I think in the decades since we’ve seen how hard that actually is for women, so publishing was this rarefied world where women held the power. That just doesn’t really exist in another industry right now, so I think that in some ways Andy is reflecting her begrudging respect, or not even begrudging, her respect for how hard this woman fought and fought her way to the top and stayed there. That is an extremely hard thing to do. I think anyone who has had a decades long career in journalism should get a medal. It is a really hard thing to do.
And so I think that that end also reflects that Andy had the choice to go follow her heart and do something she wanted. I don’t think people in journalism today always have that choice. It’s a little bit about who’ll pay me, who’ll pay me now? Is this a way station or is it a destination? And I’m glad I’m still making money in this field. So I think that has completely shifted. And without giving anything away, it’s in the reviews that just came out for Devil Wears Prada 2, you see how that works out for Andy and it doesn’t work out well.

BALL: Certainly her leaving for local news, the quasi village voice that they show, this utopian, that heartbreakingly, that does not exist. But I think that you do feel at the end that she developed real skills, resilience and friction and having to learn, learning how to spell Gabbana and all of these things have made her stronger and more sophisticated professionally. And that’s where it became not just a story about fashion, but really a story about coming to New York, about getting off, stepping off the bus into New York, going to make my way. I’m going to be knocked down a thousand times, but I’m going to get up. I think that to me is a very hopeful message that I do hope isn’t fully eroded by the dour outlook right now for young people entering the workforce.

SAFIAN: I haven’t seen the sequel, as I said. The plot involves Andy coming back to Runway to help manage Miranda’s reputation online, which is a very 2026 scenario in some ways, right? Tables turn.

MIN: Well, I’ll also say, and this is in the reviews today, so I’m not spoiling anything, there’s a scene where Miranda Priestly’s being led onto an airplane and she passes through business class and is seated in coach. I mean, it is very on the nose about publishing in 2026. I think insiders will find that entertaining, and I think everyone probably has a comp in their own work life that would make it resonate too.

SAFIAN: Sarah, is the fashion industry excited by the timing of the sequel? Does the fashion industry want this?

BALL: Oh, yeah. I think that there’s so much excitement for the film among the fashion industry, and I think the timing of it with the Met Gala and all of it all at once makes people extra aware of it. It’s very referential. A lot has been written about this. There’s not the same Vogue holding film at arm’s length. There’s a total embrace of it. Miranda Priestly on the cover, excuse me, Meryl Streep or Miranda Priestly on the cover with Anna Wintour, events in support of the film. The films had this huge global press tour. People are dressing up. They’re talking about going dressed up. It’s intergenerational, as we know, which I think hits on that kind of event movie going that has been powerful.

MIN: Sarah, am I correct? I just see a ton of headlines about all the designers. It’s like a revolving door at all the fashion-

BALL: Yes.

MIN: At all the big fashion houses. And so I would have to think that anything that makes fashion bigger on a big screen is great for fashion right now.

BALL: Yes, it’s like a fan film. Again, I will see where the plot goes and how many overstuffed celebrity cameos are in there and how-

MIN: A lot.

BALL: … durable or flimsy we feel the dramatic acts of it are. But I do think that it’s that feel good, sweep everybody up.

Copy LinkWhy the sequel fits this moment in media work and nostalgia culture

SAFIAN: And Janice, from an entertainment industry perspective, Hollywood loves a reboot obviously, but why this sequel now 20 years later?

MIN: Well, I think you got the talent to say yes for starters, right? Also, I think there is a really current workplace discussion that you can have through the lens of this movie now. Oh my God, AI, no one can get a job. LA’s too expensive, New York’s too expensive. And there is of course an affordable housing plot line also in the movie, so I think enough has changed in the world that it gave them a narrative arc.

And also, it gave you enough time to miss it. I think every time a Fast and Furious comes out, did you miss it? So I think the timing’s great. It’s worth noting that 20th Century Fox, the studio who first did this movie, no longer exists. It got bought by Disney. So it’s in a little ways, also a callback to the kinds of movies that Fox used to make on their own pre-franchise movies.

SAFIAN: Well, I was wondering whether this is prompting any reflection in Hollywood about the success of the original movie and things we should do different.

MIN: None. No, Bob.

SAFIAN: No.

MIN: No, absolutely none.

SAFIAN: No reflections.

MIN: Yeah. There will be no reflection. If this succeeds in a big way, there will be nothing about female audience. It’ll be yet another aberration of females coming to movies. Nothing. Don’t give this industry any credit.

Copy LinkWhat the movie still says about making it in New York and modern career ambition

SAFIAN: Let me try a little rapid fire round if we can. So is New York still where you want to move to make it in fashion publishing media?

BALL: I think yes. I’m going to go yes on that one. Is it as easy as it was then and it wasn’t considered easy then? No.

MIN: I think it’s now LA, San Francisco, New York.

SAFIAN: All right. Do either of you have anything you’d want to bring back from 2006?

MIN: I just miss the cultural impact of magazines. And I think in all the reckonings that we’ve been through, maybe it wasn’t cultural for everybody, but it certainly was agenda setting, and this idea of a monoculture that you could… I mean, I was doing Us Weekly. There was nothing more monoculture than Us Weekly, that everyone knew the same stars. You could talk about them in the same way, everyone shared a conversation. I miss that part.

BALL: I think that one thing I miss that again is it’s just not a current facet of maybe today’s workplaces. A ton of investment in some of these publishing companies in their own culture, in really nice workplace and nice things for people, and we’re going to do nice things together and believe that fomenting culture inside the walls is going to help us produce the work. I always think about how some of these magazines felt like the magazine was a byproduct, but what was actually the work creation was creating the culture where we could come up with the weirdest, most expensive, and hard to do ideas. I think all of that still exists, it’s just a leaner environment. So you’re not thinking, well, what if we shut down Madison Avenue and we brought in a parade and we flew a drone over and then it’s a-

MIN: Yeah, let’s do it.

BALL: Let’s do it. Yes, exactly. Doesn’t matter what it costs, we’ll worry about that later.

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SAFIAN: Watching this movie, did either of you reflect on a boss in your career who gave you a Miranda vibe, Miranda energy?

MIN: Oh, yeah. I won’t name names.

SAFIAN: You’re still afraid of them, huh?

MIN: I have not. No, I disdained them completely. No. When you have a terrible boss, you do learn, I think in that final Andy scene way, you’re like, “Okay, they made me a better version of an employee myself,” but you also learn, “This is not how I want to be. I will not conduct myself this way.” And I think when I was an editor in chief of Us Weekly, and later, Hollywood Reporter like, you don’t want to become the caricature of what a movie might tell you that job is.

BALL: Right, what’s conferred on you by dint of that title. I never had a specifically Miranda figure in that way, but I do think that the editors in chief that I worked for, I’m thinking of four different editors in chief, they did have a sense of celebrity. It didn’t feel like you were necessarily sitting in the room with a peer colleague. It felt like this is somebody who their tailoring is whisked in and it’s like I have a four-room office and they have a dry-

MIN: Three assistants.

BALL: Yes, three assistants. And so I think that that legend status, I do think about a lot. I think that authority and the creation of authority, and bearing and the role that inhabiting the role fully has in that creation of authority, I think I do think about that a lot.

SAFIAN: Part of what leadership sometimes is is illusion, right?

MIN: Right, just the magic.

SAFIAN: And what do you do to create that illusion?

MIN: Yeah.

SAFIAN: Yeah.

BALL: One thing we haven’t touched on, that’s one of the big discussion, to me funniest and most interesting discussion points out of this film is just the role that your partner supporting or not supporting your career has in the career that you pursue. Obviously, Adrian Grenier in this film as the rising chef feels that Andy is focusing way too much time on her career and maybe the rebuttal at the end is that they’re each going to go their separate ways. It has that kind of La La Land feel of two ambitious people. But so much interesting discussion that the character of Nate, he’s had a reputational rise and fall over the years. As tastes have changed about what your partner should think about a career that’s all consuming, I think it’s landed on a place of find the person that supports your dream.

SAFIAN: Whatever that dream is, even if that dream is obsessive, right?

BALL: It doesn’t guilt you about it, maybe.

MIN: Yeah. I mean, we’re in the era of trad wives, and where certain politicians will say, “Your job as a woman is to stay home and support your husband.” And that kind of message would’ve been impossible to have gained traction, I think, in the era of Devil Wears Prada 1. And it was very much, I would say, career first in a way that was, I hate to say, maybe unique to a generation, and that has ebbed and flowed since then.

SAFIAN: So last question, should we expect a Devil Wears Prada 3?

MIN: Let’s look at the numbers on Monday.

SAFIAN: Well, Janice, Sarah, thanks so much for doing it, it’s great to bounce all these things around with you.

BALL: Thank you for having us.

MIN: So great to spend time with you.

SAFIAN: So I had my version of a Miranda Priestly experience early in my career. I worked for a notorious bully in the magazine industry named Steve Brill at a trade magazine called The American Lawyer. The job was hardly glamorous, but I did learn a ton from him, both stuff I wanted to emulate and stuff that I pledged to never do.

The thing about career experiences like movies is that our takeaways often depend on us. No matter how hard we work, the most important task is often reflection. What do we prioritize on the job and in life? What can we control and what do we just have to roll with? You don’t have to be a devil or work for a devil to feel the pressure of today’s uncertain times, but you do have to get comfortable being uncomfortable to keep experimenting and learning because like fashion itself, nothing stands still.

I’m Bob Safian, thanks for listening.