Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada and Aisha Dee in The Bold Type. Images: IMDb
‘A million girls would kill for this job’ is the infamous catch cry of the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada. Based on the 2003 Lauren Weisberger novel of the same name, the cult favourite depicts the inner workings of fashion magazine Runway, loosely based on Vogue where Weisberger was an assistant to editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Meryl Streep’s demanding, cold and relentless Miranda Priestly is allegedly a cipher for Wintour. Anne Hathaway plays Priestly’s thankless second assistant Andy, who works around the clock running personal errands, forgoing her fifteen-minute lunch break and being bullied for her appearance because the tall, slender and ample-bosomed Hathaway is apparently ‘fat’ by fashion magazine standards.
But despite the abuse, it is a job a million girls would kill for. Though Andy and first assistant Emily (Emily Blunt) have high-pressure jobs that are portrayed as anything but pleasant, they are what cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen calls a ‘lovable job’. In her book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Peterson explores how ‘visible’ glamourised jobs, usually in fashion or media, ‘add social and cultural cache.’ Depicted in popular shows such as Sex and the City, The Hills, Younger, Emily in Paris and The Bold Type, a lovable job is also the ‘poorly constructed myth that motivated millennials through childhood and college’, sustaining aspirational media and publishing workers through devalued, no-guarantees arts degrees in the hope that a measly entry-level salary or freelance writing career will allow an approximation of the lifestyles seen on film and television.
It’s no surprise that said lifestyles belong to overwhelmingly white and privileged characters, conveniently leaving out inherited wealth and bankrolling parents. They seldom take into account the much likelier scenarios of dilapidated share houses and multiple jobs cobbled together to make ends meet in the gig economy we find ourselves in.
As I write this, Condé Nast employees are picketing Anna Wintour’s townhouse in protest of inadequate wages at publications like Vogue.
As The Devil Wears Prada celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year, it’s important to remember that the film was set in a pre-financial crisis world that apparently allowed probationary employees to borrow Chanel boots from the fashion closet and gifted them with unwanted surplus designer goods. Likely highly unrealistic even at the time, it’s a slap in the face to people trying to get a foothold in rapidly dwindling creative industries today.
For example, when the sector pivoted to video a few years ago, in the US it caused nearly 500 writers to lose their jobs. Cut to 2019, and 7,800 media jobs were lost. In 2020, as COVID-19 forced us to reconsider how, when and where we work, another 30,000 positions were cut. The previous record for job losses was in—you guessed it—2008. Add to this the copious business mergers and we now see a handful of conglomerates running the remaining titles. Sometimes, as a treat, these jobs are re-advertised at a dramatically reduced salary or as freelance positions without benefits such as superannuation or, as is often the case in the United States, healthcare. As I write this, Condé Nast employees are picketing Wintour’s townhouse in protest of inadequate wages at publications like Vogue.
Closer to home, all we need to do is take a look around at the magazine section (remember those?) of the supermarket, or click on the broken links of many a writer’s online portfolio, and you’ll see that the publications that—as Petersen attests—shaped our ideals about working in media have mostly disappeared. Relief funding for the arts is sorely lacking, and the abolition of JobKeeper for people in precarious employment has led to 56,000 job losses despite continued lockdowns.
All we need to do is take a look around at the magazine section and see that the publications that shaped our ideals about working in media have mostly disappeared.
Reports have gone viral that contend people would rather receive unemployment benefits than return to shitty low wage service jobs and quit than be forced back into the office. Meanwhile, women are leaving the workforce in droves, losing the zero-sum game that is undertaking paid employment while homeschooling and performing unpaid domestic and emotional labour.
The Devil Wears Prada and its ilk make it seem like if you haven’t obtained one of these elusive lovable jobs it’s because you just didn’t work hard enough. You didn’t try hard enough. You didn’t want it enough. In Can’t Even, Petersen dismantles the notion that when you do what you love, you don’t work a day in your life. As The Devil Wears Prada depicts, Emily loves her job—or at least the idea of her job and the privileges it affords her—yet she’s harming herself by working through illness or getting hit by a taxi by rushing to pick up Hermès scarves for Priestly.
Millennials and Gen Z have been doing the work to unlearn the damaging tenets of capitalism because what other choice do we have? As Petersen writes:
Millennials’ growing disillusionment with the ‘do what you love’ ethos, coupled with continued, steady demand for all of the unsexy services provided by those j-o-b-s, has given them a new sort of shine… They no longer want their dream job—they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves. After all, doing what they love burnt them to a crisp. Now they’re just doing jobs—and fundamentally reorienting their relationship to work.
Rewatching The Devil Wears Prada today, the imprint it left on our notions of work is evident. We’ve probably all seen the version of the movie villain vs. real villain meme that pits Priestley against Andy’s boyfriend, but I would wager that the real villain was capitalism all along. Andy was one of the original ‘girls who went to Paris’ celebrated in this tweet by Netflix, along with her compatriots Carrie Bradshaw and Emily of Emily in Paris. They go for work but not a holiday—because why would you ever need a break from a lovable job? This tweet posits that those who didn’t go to Paris (Rachel Green on Friends and Lauren Conrad on The Hills) are failures for choosing love over career, a point that is touched on in The Devil Wears Prada with Miranda’s divorce, initiated by her husband while she is attending Paris Fashion Week.
Reports have gone viral that contend people would rather receive unemployment benefits than return to shitty low wage jobs.
The modern day successors of The Devil Wears Prada put in somewhat of an effort to display the hardship behind the glamour. Kat, Jane and Sutton of The Bold Type share a one-bedroom apartment, cycling in and out as their respective relationship and financial statuses change, while Younger hinges on the premise that a 40-something woman who’s been out of the workforce raising children won’t have any job prospects when she returns.
In Younger, Liza (Sutton Foster) pretends to be in her twenties in order to get a publishing job alongside actual twenty-something Kelsey (Hilary Duff). In one episode, after a requisite singalong to Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5’—itself the eponymous soundtrack to another iconic film about how women are at a disadvantage at work—Kelsey exclaims ‘Oh my god, people in the ’80s only worked from 9 to 5!’
However, at the end of the day (which doesn’t end at 5pm), these shows are known for their impracticability. After all, Younger is made by the same people who brought us Sex and the City, while The Bold Type’s version of Miranda Priestly, Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin), becomes like a second mother to her employees, further collapsing the separation of work, family and identity.
In contrast, a recent example with a more unsettling conclusion is the 2021 film Cruella, which has drawn comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada due to its fashion-world setting and shared screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna. Estella (Emma Stone) adopts her ruthless employer’s ‘killer instinct’ and emerges a ‘girlboss’ villain. Yet, as comically twisted as it is, perhaps she is better adapted to a dog-eat-dog world, pardon the pun. As Heather Schwedel notes at Slate: ‘Andy goes on to become a truth-seeking, serious minded journalist …Estella goes onto the presumably much more remunerative life of becoming Cruella de Vil.’
The modern day successors of The Devil Wears Prada put in somewhat of an effort to display the hardship behind the glamour.
Books written by authors who face marginalisation are doing a better job of portraying the reality of the modern workforce, digging deeper into satire and politics to mount strong social commentary. Literature such as Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, Impersonation by Heidi Pitlor and the newly released The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (described as ‘Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada’) all deal with young, disadvantaged women reckoning with the deceptions of loveable jobs in a capitalist society that’s designed for them to fail. In one telling scene in Such a Fun Age, protagonist Emira strategises with her best friend exactly how much money—down to the dollar—she’ll need to negotiate to accept a job offer from a not-for-profit in order to finally escape her insidious job babysitting the child of an out-of-touch influencer.
The Devil Wears Prada might have depicted a pipe dream, if only for one in a million girls who would be willing to kill for it. Fifteen years later, in a gig economy that has eroded the conditions of workers and erased many stable jobs in the arts and media industries, viewers are better equipped to understand that they’re likelier to always belong to the other 999,999.
