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Attitudes to body standards and corporate exploitation are among themes that look dated in the 2006 smash hitThere’s to be a follow-up to the film The Devil Wears Prada, with original screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, “in talks” to provide the script. The 2006 ­comedy, starring Anne Hathaway as Andy, the put-upon assistant to Meryl Streep’s glacial New York fashion magazine ­editor, Miranda Priestly, was an enormous global hit ­(taking $327m at the box office). As well as the planned sequel, there’s a stage musical opening at the Dominion theatre in London’s West End at the end of this month, ­starring Vanessa Williams as Priestly, with music by Elton John. Almost two decades after the ­original, it appears the ­franchise has been reawakened, but so too have the problematic issues surrounding it.The first point to be made about The Devil Wears Prada is that it was, to employ ­fashion ­vernacular, fabulous, ­darling! Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel, a thinly disguised account of her time working as Anna Wintour’s ­assistant at US Vogue, it was a ­genuinely witty film about ­fashion which, save for Ben Stiller’s ­sublime Zoolander, are surprisingly rare. Curiously, for an industry teeming with big characters, cinematic takes have tended towards the laboured (Robert Altman’s 1994 Prêt-à-Porter), the misfiring (2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic) and the downright dreary (Daniel Day-Lewis’s designer moping about like he’d swallowed a pin cushion in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2018). Continue reading...