Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Photo by Macall Polay/Macall Polay - © 2026 20th Century Studios.

The Fascists Have the Outfits

It was silly of me to expect The Devil Wears Prada 2 to be anything other than what it was. After the first film’s compelling and campy approach to the morally questionable world of high fashion, though, I had high hopes. But gone are the days of investigating the devastating contortion of the self that this world requires. The sequel presents the luxury fashion industry uncritically, resulting in a clear image of the ways it upholds modern-day fascism off-screen.

The primary conflict of the film occurs when Irv Ravitz, the previous owner of Runway magazine, dies, and the magazine is then passed on to his son, Jay Ravitz, played by B.J. Novak. Novak’s character is quick to look for ways to squeeze even more money for even less cost, striding into the office in the tech-bro uniform of a sleeveless vest and quarter-zip, throwing around words like “optimization.” He brings in a team of consultants, sharks in sharp suits, and Andi (Anne Hathaway) is devastated to learn that they plan on gutting the magazine and replacing as much work as they can with AI-generated content. Here, the film lands on something resonant: though Runway upholds the luxury fashion industry in all its ills, it certainly seems like a version of the world where this work is carried out by artificial intelligence is a worse one.

In our heroines’ journey to rescue their magazine from the clutches of AI slopification, we meet another new character in the universe of The Devil Wears Prada, boyfriend of Andi’s frenemy Emily (Emily Blunt) and reigning tech billionaire Benji Barnes, played by Justin Theroux. He is a composite character, fashioned from the men running the world today, characterized by rockets, glow-ups, divorces, and a bumbling awkwardness that allows the movie to write him off as harmless despite the near-constant sexual harassment that occurs every time he is on-screen. Through the magazine’s connection to him via Emily, Benji is convinced to buy Runway from the younger Ravitz, and the women are certain they have saved their workplace from GenAI degeneration. Only when it is too late do they learn that Barnes’s purchase is not the answer they thought it was: he has bought the magazine as a gift to Emily, who plans to exact revenge on Miranda Priestly by installing herself as the Editor-in-Chief.

Through Benji’s character, TDWP2 offers a tepid, occasional criticism of this group of yassified billionaire men bulldozing the world off-screen, but the comic asides legitimize these men as largely benign, overgrown children. Benji is not a threat, but a clumsy, horny fool, easily outwitted by the women around him in a you-go-girl plot twist.

At the end of the day, the savior of Runway magazine is yet another billionaire: the ex-wife of Benji swoops in at the last second to rip the magazine from his clutches so that it may survive to write puff pieces about sweatshops another day. Things are alright, so long as the ill-gotten wealth that will allow the machine of industry to continue running belongs to the bold feminist icon of the woman-billionaire.

The problem, therefore, is not class or capitalism; it is nothing structural at all. There is no recognition of the common thread between the profit-driven, dehumanizing logic of AI supremacy espoused by Ravitz and the way that all of the money in the world of luxury fashion comes from the exact same place, even as the film acknowledges the existence of labor abuse at its outset. In fact, Andi is brought back onto the team at Runway to do damage control after the magazine published a puff piece about a brand that uses sweatshop labor. We breeze past this recognition of the brutality of the fashion supply chain almost immediately, and it is reduced to nothing more than an inconvienent misstep. TDWP2 is only interested in peeling back the curtain on the mechanisms of the luxury fashion world insofar as it impacts those at the top of the food chain.

Our heroines are forced to face a mirror, and they insist on closing their eyes. The film treats class, AI mythologizing, and misogyny as discrete forces, employing a near brain-splitting cognitive dissonance to allow audiences to enjoy the nostalgia of the sequel without having to stomach the reality of the role of luxury fashion.

There are glimmers of self-awareness. Throughout the film, TDWP2 attempts to murmur self-effacing jokes about the harm of the industry it seeks to indulge, as if a tongue-in-cheek awareness of one's contribution to the crushing machine of capitalism is enough to absolve it. For example, while touring a new apartment, Andi jokes that luxury apartment renovators—those drivers of the urban renewal flavor of gentrification—are the ones making the world so bad, then moves into said luxury apartment and begins dating the contractor she just took a shot at, neutralizing this criticism entirely. The film vents vague but valid complaints against the fashion industry through dialogue, but the actions of the characters ultimately undermine any sort of resistance to that harm.

But it still manages to snag on something real, despite its refusal to confront the logic of extraction undergirding the industry: it captures the role of fashion as a tool to power for the ultra-wealthy. There was a time when the billionaire class, particularly the tech billionaire class, struggled to align with the emergent aesthetics of fascism, which are rooted in control of the body. It is not just sleek, expensive, dark suits, but the engineered bodies and constructed faces that sport them.

The fact that the visual “rebranding” of men like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk coincided with their explicit alignment with right-wing authoritarianism is no accident. It marks our moment of technofascism, a form of fascism named by Joel Kabakov in 2022 to describe the partnership between technological advancement and fascism as the new mechanism of global control.

In “Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the New Authoritarianism,” a 2026 article published in AI & Society, Mark Coeckelbergh writes that a key feature of fascist conditions is the “fusion of state, corporate, and paramilitary powers into an apparatus of domination,” describing it as a “monster with many heads,” each vying for power. The corporate wing of this competition, in the form of the tech billionaire class, initially struggled to aestheticize in comparison to its state and paramilitary counterparts, who parlayed red hats and American flags and paramilitary gear into a galvanizing visual rhetoric while they floundered in gray t-shirts and unflattering haircuts.

This moment is no longer. Through hair transplants, Botox, investment in stylists and luxury fashion, and perhaps GLP1s, perhaps steroids, perhaps weights, these men have fashioned themselves out of the role of cringey outsider and onto the throne. There is a distinct flair of manosphere-esque masculinity to their new style. Their new appearances are successful in large part because they conform to the gender binary where they previously did not.

Fascism relies on logics of domination, thinking that entails the presence of an ultimate dominator, a supreme. This strong man, the populist leader, must be at the apex of these logics of supremacy, and the role of spectacle in fascisms requires that this must be signified not just verbally, but visually. With their old appearances, these men were cast as weak, as effeminate. They were overgrown losers, nerds, decidedly not at the top of the patriarchal hierarchy. It was easy to take potshots at them, and it perhaps felt justified—what is a joke in poor taste compared to the evil of an oligarch? Through aesthetic adjustments, however, this narrative was shifted. Images of fragility were replaced with strength, impotence with power, and the better they conformed to these standards of beauty, the further these tech billionaires ascended in the fascistic hydra.

In TDWP2, this is visible in the presentation of Benji’s character. Though audiences only see him post-transformation, other characters make reference to a “before” version, an overgrown outcast. This is the excuse presented for the frequency with which he crosses sexual boundaries: of course he doesn’t know how to talk to women, he used to be a loser! But now that he is attractive in addition to his wealth, these transgressions can be excused. He has moved up in the hierarchy of gender, the one place where he did not have control before.

Though these aren’t the words used, this is the takeaway: he used to be ugly, and now he’s hot. This newfound attractiveness, achieved through a fake tan, weight loss, and a stylist, buys him power on-screen. He finds his way into the fashion world through his relationship with Emily, who is with him presumably because he is wealthy and they look good together—there is little else presented on screen that we might believe unites the pair.

Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Photo by Macall Polay/Macall Polay - © 2026 20th Century Studios.

It is the combination of wealth and attractiveness that brings him into the rooms of powerful men, the places where the flow of information is bought and sold. After all, Runway is only one magazine within the Ravitz media empire. Through his relationship with Emily, and therefore his ability to perform the aesthetics of the peak of the fascist hierarchy, his influence in the world grows. Together, they are straight, white, and beautiful, a perhaps overly literal interpretation of the term “power couple.” He is able to buy control of Runway through his connection with Emily, and he is connected with Emily because he has engineered himself to fit masculine standards of beauty.

Here, the film diverges from the actual flow of power. Benji’s beauty brought him into the world of information control, but in reality, the men he represents ran the digital wing of fashion’s empire long before they conformed to its aesthetics. For example, Bezos’s Amazon quietly promotes particular styles and products to shape the ways that shoppers might design themselves through their purchases from his digital retail behemoth. He did not need to be muscular to tell the world that it should want to be. This is true of Meta, Google, Apple, X, and so on—the men at the helm of these platforms, through the insidiously near-invisible power of the algorithm’s control of communication, wield incredible influence over what is in and what is out in the world of fashion and the ways we express ourselves via the body. Through social media and search engines, they influence societal understandings of what is beautiful and what is ugly, and they have been doing this long before they broke out of the slouchy, nerdy typecast they once found themselves trapped in.

Where Benji needed beauty to secure his control of taste, wealth was enough for the tech billionaire class on that front. Instead, what the aesthetic transformations of men like Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg bought them was cultural legitimacy. Rather than exercising subtle control in the world of fashion from behind the screen, their conformity to beauty standards now allows them to fit seamlessly into broadcasted rooms of power, aesthetically speaking. In terms of sheer material power, they always belonged, but their appearance presented a barrier to entry in the circle of power that was broadcast to the public. Now, in a moment of fascism shaped by capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, there is an implicit social understanding that a man like that—fit, handsome, stylish—should be in power, a social bias that they themselves helped enforce.

For example, Jeff Bezos was the primary donor of this year’s Met Gala, the sort of event that the overworked and underfed interns of Runway magazine would be clawing over each other to attend. It would have felt wrong if the Bezos of the past had run this event. His appearance—receding hairline, wrinkled button-down shirts—would have presented a rhetorical disjointedness in the streamlined world of beauty. But the Bezos of today, proudly bald, boxtoxed, and buff, with a wife that fits just as seamlessly into women’s beauty standards? The visuals are coherent. It makes sense.

Though he gains different benefits, it is this same sort of aesthetic seamlessness that Benji achieves in the movie. In both the TDWP2 universe and our own, a handsome man accompanied by a beautiful woman is allowed to wield power with incredible ease because the world of luxury fashion, the industry of aesthetics, aims to convince us that this is exactly the sort of person that should.

So what happens when tech billionaires both exemplify and control the aesthetic hierarchy during fascism? It is now not just about the clothes, but the body itself. It is fashion as in self-fashioning, with the expectation that admittance to the in-group, among other things, requires one to enforce technofascist logics on the body. Benji reinvents his appearance; he rebrands himself. The physical body becomes an object to be engineered and controlled—after his divorce, he gets a tan, he loses weight. Though it happens off-screen, we understand that he is allowed into the Runway universe ultimately because he has applied the logics of optimization to his own desirability.

This is the aesthetic application of technosolutionism, the idea that emergent technologies universally and exclusively provide the best answers to the challenges of modern life. What is the Ozempic era if not the logical entailment of that, applied to the body? The problem of having a form that is not thin, a condition that prohibits acceptance to the top of the hierarchy, can now be solved (as though it were a problem) with technology. Biohacking, looksmaxxing, plastic surgery—a litany of body technologies now exist at our disposal to better conform.

While TDWP2 tries to shirk some of the body fascisms it once showed us, primarily through increasing diversity of race and size in casting, it still embraces the same supremacist logics. There is no one attempting to reshape their bone structure with a hammer on-screen, but the vast majority of faces we see still conform to Eurocentric standards of beauty, often through the use of Botox and plastic surgery on the part of the actors that portray them, and there are throw-away jokes about how carbs “don’t count” when they’re shared with friends. This functions like Andi’s hollow virtue signaling in relation to her real-estate-developer boyfriend, where words and actions are misaligned, and the purported values of the film’s characters are undermined by their actions. Where the first film, for better or for worse, did not shy away from authentically representing the nasty edge of 2000’s-era beauty standards, the sequel wants to pretend that justice in the world of luxury fashion has been largely achieved, a self-delusion that results in the quiet reinforcement of the original issue it wishes to pretend no longer exists.

Fascism has always relied on visual branding. In Coeckelbergh’s words, “politics becomes a matter of rallies, parades, uniforms, symbols, and choreographed mass participation.” It is a spectacle, an aesthetic, and at its heart, the fascist aesthetic is a tool for enforcing the binary: first, the determination of the “us” vs. the “them,” and second, the annihilation of the “them.” One of these binaries, in our current technofascist moment, is the divide between the beautiful and the ugly, concepts bursting at the seams with intersecting supremacist thought.

We do not see the explicit destruction of the “them” in TDWP2, only the travails of the “us.” Aside from the mention of sweatshop labor at the film’s outset—included mainly as plot device to bring our protagonists together—there is a near-complete erasure of those who are not permitted access, for whatever reason, to the rooms of power. The working class, whose labor is necessary for the entire industry of luxury fashion, is blotted out. By not representing the full scope of the empire of beauty on-screen, the film participates in that fascistic annihilation in the real world.

It allows us to avoid facing the material reality of the fashion industry, a ignorance necessary so that we might have fun during our brief dalliance into the world of power and aesthetics. The reality of the circumstances that create the ultra-wealthy class must be erased in order to celebrate the billionaire-led recovery of Runway, and the more we exercise this muscle of cognitive disonnance in film and media, the easier we might employ it to stomach our circumstances it in the real world. This is what allows us to indulge, for example, Bezos’s Met Gala. We must ignore what propelled him to the extreme wealth that enabled him to bankroll the event in order to admire the beauty of the event itself. Enjoying the outfits requires avoiding the circumstances that allowed for their existence—the same brain-splitting doublespeak that Andi employs to protect her own sense of morality in the amoral world of luxury and wealth.

The luxury fashion industry, as much as The Devil Wears Prada 2 would like to pretend innocence, is married to the installation of technofascism. Despite, for example, all that anti-AI blustering in the film, Stanley Tucci and Simone Ashley are currently starring in ads for Google’s new generative AI capabilities by using them to try on outfits in the Runway dressing room.

Fashion, as a means of visually crafting rhetoric in culture, is a tool for discerning between the acceptable and the unacceptable within the binary logic of technofascism. Through our bodies and the way we adorn them, a clear division rises between the “us” and the “them,” between adherence and transgression, along the intersecting lines of class, race, and gender. Tech billionaires, those wolves in chic clothing, wield the fashion industry as a tool to enforce conformity and now to self-legitimize their role at the top of the hierarchy. After all, if we believe there is something sacred in the beautiful, then beauty is an incredible defense for evil.