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Eighteen years after its release, The Devil Wears Prada is having a bit of a moment. Clips and comments proliferate across TikTok; a YouTube video of its star, Anne Hathaway, rewatching the film is circulating. It is therefore awkward, as a style writer, to admit that I’ve never seen it.
Until this week. And the movie provided a genuine surprise. Devil, as it turns out, is almost totally indifferent to clothes. Yes, the characters are elaborately dressed, and they name-drop lots of designers. Yet the director, David Frankel, never directs our attention to the fashion and the clothes’ particular properties never figure in the story. This is a movie about fashion in the way an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is about guns.
The plot is a reverse Cinderella, in which the hero rejects the role of princess after discovering that the royal family is thoroughly rotten — but offers them a measure of redemption on the way out the door. Hathaway plays an idealistic and unfashionable young journalist who gets a job working for the wicked stepmother, a proxy of Vogue’s Anna Wintour, played by actor Meryl Streep. You know the rest, whether you’ve seen the movie or not.
What the movie does care about is power’s conflict with integrity. Streep’s character and her retainers are never made to appear attractive or to experience anything recognisable as pleasure in their work. What they have is influence, money and fame. In the pivotal scene, the ingénue scoffs at some nice distinction of style, and receives an icy lecture from the wicked stepmother in reply. The speech might have been about how appearances matter. Instead, it is about raw power: how the girl’s frumpy cerulean sweater, which she thought she chose herself, in fact ended up on her back “because of decisions made by people in this room”.
Someone looking for a big Hollywood movie about clothes can, however, turn to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, from 2017, which I also just watched for the first time. It might also be read as a movie about power: the plot is an emotional wrestling match between a brilliant and controlling couturier, Reynolds Woodcock, and his much younger model and muse, Alma. A better interpretation, though, is that the dressmaker, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, endures a painful and chaotic inner life, and seeks relief by creating an outer life of great beauty and order. Can such a person be in love? How and with whom?
The message of the movie is emphatically not that the artist must let go of aesthetic devotion in order to be redeemed by the human connection. Without his dresses, the dressmaker would not be a viable person at all. Instead, a kind of love blooms when the muse rises to become a collaborator. The key moment is when Reynolds and Alma, played by Vicky Krieps, having worked on a dress for a customer who defiles it with drunkenness, storm the woman’s hotel room in a shared rage to retrieve their work. The obsession with beauty that keeps the two apart also joins them.
Phantom, unlike Devil, is always focused on the clothes themselves (the costumes won an Academy award). It’s not just the couture; this viewer nearly wept at Woodcock’s suits, jumpers and beautiful carmine socks.
Both movies contain lessons. The enduring resonance of Devil reminds us that when most people think about fancy clothes, they are thinking about power. Those of us who are interested in them aesthetically, intellectually or professionally often forget this. In the public imagination, clothes are uniforms first, and a uniform’s first duty is to denote rank. This is the point, of course, of the perversely named quiet luxury trend: in an era nominally committed to casualisation, it is an acceptable way to signal economic dominance.
The link to power is why, on social media and elsewhere, comments about men’s clothes can provoke strong feelings. These usually take the form of an insistence — one that doth protest too much — that clothes no longer matter to status at all.
Phantom, on the other hand, teaches an opposed lesson, about the private uses of clothes. While love — of a bizarre sort — saves Woodcock in the end, it is his concern with appearances that makes his life viable in the first place. Clothes hold him up. They can hold us up too. The most important message they send is directed to the wearer.
Robert Armstrong is the FT’s US financial commentator
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