Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

"It's Sex in the City — without the sex." That was Mrs Rainy Day's take on The Devil Wears Prada. But it's a laugh. And the audience loved it. What more can one demand of entertainment? Those who go to the film in hopes of learning more about the New York publishing industry will leave the cinema unenlightened, but those who want to see gorgeous fashion (the majority of the film's fans) will be satisfied. The rest is lipstick and slapstick and CSI New York-inspired shots of Manhattan's astonishing cityscape.

The only time that reality intrudes is when the satanic Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) shreds her idealistic assistant, Andy (Anne Hathaway), for wearing student-like outfits while regarding fashion "stuff" as beneath her intelligence. Says Miranda:

This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's actually cerulean. You're also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so 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 the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

Streep delivers this withering lecture on consumerism brilliantly and it's worth the price of admission alone to hear it. Is the message of the film that on the way to the top women have to sacrifice more than men? Well, you won't find that kind of analysis here for the simple reason that The Devil Wears Prada is a feel-good film and only the most dour Marxist-feminists would want to ruin the fun. If anything, though, the PC plague is detectable throughout the movie, and especially in the ending, when it is suggested that power, glamour and money aren't all they're said to be and that the wannabe journalist (Hathaway) will be happier wearing lumpy blue sweaters and working for the New York Mirror (a Nation-like muckraker) than Runway (a Vogue-like glossy). Really?