By The first The Devil Wears Prada was a fun outing for Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci to have some well-dressed larks, but above all for Meryl Streep to play the autocratic fashionista Miranda Priestly. She was apparently a thinly disguised riff on the infamous Vogue editor Anna Wintour, with the additional hauteur of Christine Lagarde. It was glamorous bubblegum, with some well-placed jokes, and if Streep was Cruella de Ville with a bit of a heart, and little more – well, being Streep, she was devastatingly good.
It managed to avoid the dangerous rocks of Zoolander and the eddies of AbFab – narrowly. (Yes, pun intended).
It’s taken a number years for Streep and the others to agree to Prada 2, and she especially wanted to be sure that the movie had more to it than a reprise.
It does.
I’m not going to spoil it because some of you might love to see it for the plots and frocks. But it’s obviously set in the new world where print journalism is now significantly threatened by online rivals, undercutting their financial operation. You might think, ‘so what?’, but it means there’s a twist of lemon in the whole scenario, which gives each of the principal characters something new to play against and to grow. You’ll have to see it to decide whether Priestly has a heart after all.
She does have the best lines, of course. The snap is still there.
But it ruins nothing to say that the second half of the movie is set during Milan fashion week, and the old town is looking as stunning as ever it does. It’s a glamorous love-in for that part of Italy, including lakes and boats, so you could just go for the travel shots. It makes Manhattan’s shiny steel-and-glass look quite superficial.
But there’s one scene which is worth paying very close attention to. It does something which nothing in the first movie prepared you for, and shows that there is actually serious intent here.
There are five rival worldviews on serious display and explicitly interacting, and one of them is the gospel
There are five rival worldviews on serious display and explicitly interacting, and one of them is the gospel. This is the scene which will get people in and outside church talking, and where you as a preacher have a role and an insight.
It’s set during a dinner being held in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie.
That is, it’s filmed in the room where Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ was painted. Their meal takes place in its presence. (I assume it was a set – given how tightly they monitor the humidity of that room, the presence of candles, cameras, food and lots of actors would massively damage the fresco. But suspend your disbelief.)
Five worldviews for you to preach into
Worldview One – the Silicon Valley Techbro
Enter the tech billionaire, Benji Barnes. He’s the most cartoony of all the main characters, and he’s a mashup: a divorcé with a high profile and now wealthy ex-wife (h/t, Gates), who plans to send a rocket to the sun (h/t Musk), who uses faddish diets, exercise, surgery to live life longer (h/t Thiel).
He has a nice line about restricting his drinking – his latest plan is to be in an aqua-deficit.
But Barnes is there to represent relentless tech progress. Everything passes, he says, and one day we’ll all disappear into the galaxy’s decay. Tradition, whether in art, or journalism, or the skill of haut couture, are the unnecessary clutter of the past.
It’s important to remember that for a few of those elite super wealthy this really is their view. Transhumanism, by which we can escape death by being uploaded into a digital form, is something they are seriously pursuing.
Your worry that their AI might take your job means nothing to them.
Worldview Two – The Craft
Opposing him is Miranda Priestly – Streep as the icy defender of traditional craft. Isn’t human skill and beauty worth defending? She means the writers and fashion designers, of course – although, more the latter. I want to come back to this in a moment, but here I’ll make an initial point.
In this world, fashion is really, really NOT trivial.
In the first movie hardly any real-life people from the world of fashion took part. The rumour was that they were terrified of Anna Wintour, and so wouldn’t dare. This time, not only is there massive product placement for Chanel, Dior, and countless other brands, but there is a list in the credits of those who appeared as themselves.
Why would they do that?
Well, that partly product placement, obviously. This will be high-class merch. Partly they also wanted a bit of fun, I imagine. It looked like a wonderful party, darling. Mwah. And Wintour, like Priestly, does not hold the power she once did. There’ll be no comeback
But don’t miss that this movie is making a serious pitch for the importance of fashion-as-art in a world of AI-as-cheap-‘art’, and I think most of those involved signed up because that theme profoundly resonates for them.
Worldview Three – The Art Restorers
Barnes and Priestly talk in front of, and with reference to, ‘The Last Supper’. It is a notoriously decayed and restored piece of work. Leonardo experimented wildly with his techniques as he painted, and some ideas – like using oil paint on wet plaster – proved expensively foolish.
So we have the tragedy of what is generally seen to be one of the masterpieces of world art, only kept alive by endless care and restoration. Is such an artefact worth preserving, or should it fall into its inevitable decay?
This transposes Priestley’s case into a new key. Her world is fashion, which is almost by definition, ephemeral. Our local cinema advertises this movie by quoting one of the most famous lines from the first: ‘Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.’ Because the fashion world lives not only on the ever-changing seasons, but their never-ending responses to those seasons. We cannot wear this spring what we wore last spring.
But Leonardo makes the long case of this. The Last Supper is now something like 525 years old. Is it worth preserving? Or do we say that all seasons, even long ones, turn?
A quick note – if you think I’m overdoing this, the subplot also has the theme of restoration of the old baked into it. So, this is a thing.
Worldview Four – Leonardo himself
Priestly engages in some art criticism (better than Dan Brown’s, don’t worry). She draws attention to the central figure in the fresco. She deliberately doesn’t name him (‘Jesus’, ‘Christ’ would be words too weighty for such a gossamer-thin movie), but point to the well-known fact that he doesn’t have a halo. Representations of this scene exist all over Europe, she says (actually, she says ‘frescoes’ of it, which is not true – they’re pretty much an inland Italian phenomenon), but in each one he, and all the disciples, have a halo.
Here, none of them has a halo.
Priestly makes this say that the central figure, like all of us, is only human, imperfect, and doing our best. I won’t say much more about this scene, because two plot moves spin out from this conversation. And Leonardo’s motives are always opaque.
But this will make people look again at the fresco, especially if they are only vaguely familiar with it. There’s a Jesus conversation here. Was he just a good man, trying his best? Or is there more, which cannot be explained without that halo?
Worldview Five – the Gospel
Because Priestly is right – the uniform Christian tradition up to this point was that Jesus does have that halo. He is the Son of God and Son of Man, painted on the night before his betrayal, trial, death and resurrection. Even if Leonardo was trying to paint a secular Last Supper (which is unlikely, given its setting in a convent), the backdrop of hundreds of years of the supernatural narrative is just too strong. And anyway, elsewhere Leonardo does use the device – in both the London and Paris versions of the ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary all have haloes, so he wasn’t averse to the idea.
As I say, all five of those worldviews are explicitly in play in that scene. And although the glamorous centre of the movie less elsewhere, and people will make a big deal of the fashion show, Lady Gaga and a host of other bijou moments, this scene is worth watching and paying close attention to. I did wonder whether there was a sixth worldview as well, namely that of the filmmaker, but I think the director, David Frankel, wears his heart on his sleeve.
He thinks Miranda Priestly is right, and his movie is not only a love-letter to the fashion industry, but a visible love-letter to the movie industry as well. There are several ‘look-at-me’ set-pieces which are gorgeous in their colour and framing.
Fashion
All of which leaves me in the odd dilemma of wondering if I want to defend the fashion industry.
Because, I’m really not a fashion man. Stanley Tucci, I’m not. My wardrobe is, as Dame Edna would have said, ‘affordable’. I can brush up well when the occasion demands, but that’s the limit of it.
And I’ve not really had much time for the concept of fashion. The then head of London Fashion Week once tried to persuade an audience I was in, that the validity of fashion was those changing seasons. All he managed to persuade me was that I needed a coat for winter. I don’t need a new coat every year.
There’s an inbuilt predicate of waste in that model, designed obsolescence as they say, which seems to me to be the opposite of good stewardship.
And much of the high street is right next to the sweatshop. The movie reminds us of that from the outset.
I’m not going to argue that ‘it’s all gonna burn, baby’ – that puts Leonardo in the same bonfire as TKMaxx, and I’m not going to do that: the here-and-now can have validity, and not all here-and-nows have equal validity.
But this movie makes a strong case for something which is largely invisible to me, but clearly not to many. The world of haut couture, those demanding ateliers in Paris, the close-to-parody hats are clearly trying to achieve something spectacularly exacting. Not here-and-now.
That’s explicit in the scenes about the opening of a new Dior store in New York. The building not only has an explicit homage to the original store in Paris, but honours the skilled ateliers behind it.
This is art, and skill, says the movie. And it is therefore worthwhile.
That’s obvious in the visual parallels the movie draws for us. The Cathedral in Milan, and the nearby Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II – the world’s first shopping centre – are majestic. It’s not only the Italian lakes which are beautiful – so are the villas and the boats which grace it.
Each of them makes us exclaim ‘Bella figura!’ Doesn’t it?
So why shouldn’t Prada, too?
I used to be sniffy about the ‘f’ word. In my view, it’s the choice between James Bonds: Connery, or Moore. Moore is the epitome of fashion, out of date with his lapels and flares. Connery, of cool, lasting style.
But of course, every stitch of Connery’s suits were designed and made by a human with an eye and a hand.
There’s a discussion we need to have about whether any artistic endeavour has any value at all. To those who think that only evangelism and disciple making matter, what I’ve said will make no sense at all. On that grid all the arts, science and medicine too, are a distraction.
But Prada 2 has made me think again. About the dignity of beauty of human design, even in something as inherently transient as florals for a divinely-designed spring.
Maybe we don’t need to consign Prada to the devil.
You know the drill, pile in. Have you seen the movie, and did I get it right. And don’t forget that if you’re lucky enough to be near London, the Royal Academy has a near-contemporary copy of ‘The Last Supper’ which is close to seeing it as it was meant to be seen
