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As Andy Sachs returns to Runway as the magazine’s new features editor in The Devil Wears Prada 2, we put our very own features editor Hadley Stewart on our latest digital cover.
If The Devil Wears Prada is a fantasy, the sequel is a reality check. I was aged 10 in 2006 when the original film came out. And alongside another movie that was also released that year and had a formative effect on me – Daniel Craig emerging from the sea in Casino Royale is arguably responsible for my sexual awakening – The Devil Wears Prada changed the course of my life forever.
I have a vague memory of walking into the living room to find my mum watching The Devil Wears Prada on DVD. Clearly mesmerised by the glamour of the movie and its montages, I sat down on the sofa next to her. I was hooked and by the age of 15 I was watching the film every Sunday afternoon.
So when the sequel was announced, I started thinking about how we at Vada could honour the movie I love and owe so much to. My friend suggested that whatever we did, it needed to be fun and tongue in cheek. “The world has become so serious,” she said. Then Meryl Streep was interviewed by Stephen Colbert wearing a cerulean jumper, and given that Andy Sachs was returning to Runway as the magazine’s features editor, I thought about putting Vada’s features editor on the cover… That would be me. Cut to me sweating through a blue jumper, in a baking hot lift, with photographer Hannah Mittelstaedt and stylist Hannah Garside one Friday afternoon.
(Hannah Mittelstaedt/Vada Magazine)When it came to finding other queer journalists who have been touched by the film’s magic, it turned out that I didn’t need to look very far. “I first watched the film when I was an aspiring journalist, dreaming of making a living in a buzzy, creative industry,” says Roxy Bourdillon, editor-in-chief of DIVA magazine and author of What A Girl Wants: A (True) Story Of Sexuality And Self-discovery, when I ask her about what impact the original movie had on her. “I’ve always been obsessed with magazines and I’m a sucker for a makeover montage, so it’s right up my street. I really enjoy the costumes (designed by legendary lesbian Patricia Field of Sex And The City fame) and the delicious feeling of being allowed a peek inside this secret, high-powered, New York fashion world. Plus the characters and performances are so much fun.”
Another journalist and The Devil Wears Prada fan, Alastair James, says he loves “everything” about the first film and actually referenced it during a job interview. “As bizarre as it may sound, I can trace the origins of my interest in journalism back to the film,” he reflects. “Becoming a journalist was never a die-hard ambition of mine. That it became a career was very sudden and sort of by accident. But it was the snapshots provided by films and shows like The Devil Wears Prada that got me interested in working in journalism, magazine being the medium I thought would, always a keen writer and reader growing up, would make the most sense. It’s one of the reasons I moved from broadcasting with the BBC to Attitude a few years back; it felt like I was in the right place.”
But my teenage Sunday afternoons in front of the TV in Manchester were literally and figuratively thousands of miles away from New York’s magazine industry, a world I was desperate to be a part of. Plus, I didn’t know anyone who was a journalist. It was a road that seemed difficult, unclear and closed-off to me; the thought of not being able to achieve my dream felt too painful. So, I took a different path. I set aside the dream of becoming a writer at a magazine, and moved to London to study and embark on a totally different career. I lasted a couple of months before I started to yearn for something more.
(Hannah Mittelstaedt/Vada Magazine)Walking into my internship at PACE, the now closed LGBTQ+ mental health charity, I wore a blazer and black skinny jeans – a uniform that I still stick by today. It wasn’t Runway, it wasn’t even a magazine, but it was writing for a cause that I felt passionate about. On my first day, my boss Rachel Booles tasked me to write a guide for parents whose child had just come out. When she called me over to her desk at the end of the day, she asked me: “How do you feel about harsh editorial feedback?” I half-smiled and shrugged. “Hadley, I really think you should consider writing as a career.” And those words were the only ones I needed to fall back in love with my dream.
My internship was extended from three months to nine, during which I was still attending university and working from the office one day a week. Yet these were different times: my degree was paid for by a bursary, and the charity was paying for my lunch and travel expenses. And as well as being an unparalleled opportunity to grow as both a writer and as a queer person, looking back the internship prepared me for some of the harsh realities of a career in journalism. The internship was unpaid, and whilst I eventually managed to secure paid writing work after I left, I worked for several years for next to no money, followed by months of chasing unpaid invoices. What’s more, during my time at the charity, it went through a restructure, with people losing their jobs overnight. Little did I know, it wouldn’t be my only experience of redundancies during the course of my career.
After I graduated, I continued to pursue two careers at the same time, because I couldn’t make a living out of writing and London is an expensive city to live in. It was tough, but I loved it. My week would involve waking up at 5am and surviving on six hours of sleep, such was the “hustle” that we millennials had been told we should expect. At its peak, I was writing five articles per month, alongside working my full-time job. I wasn’t alone, though. I knew of others in their early twenties working all hours to try to make it in journalism. Writing for Harper’s Bazaar, Louis Staples argues that The Devil Wears Prada glamourises the lack of work-life balance that Andy has, further fuelling our generation’s self-imposed pressure to have a “side hustle” and to put work above all. It’s an analysis that certainly rings true to me.
Speaking of a glamorous facade, sometimes people who don’t work in the industry ask me what lies beneath. It’s true that most of the time, I’m not living my The Devil Wears Prada fantasy life – although I would never share that with my younger self, because that was very much his driving force. That said, there are moments in my career that hark back to the original movie. A couple of years ago, Vada’s editor-in-chief Adam Lowe sent me an email. “Not really my thing, but passing it on in case it’s of interest,” he wrote. It was an invitation to the Haute Couture shows in Paris. As I arrived in a cold and wet Paris in January 2023, I took a photo of the Eiffel Tower and posted it on Instagram with the caption: “The 15 year-old who watched The Devil Wears Prada every Sunday is in Paris to watch the Haute Couture fashion shows. Pinch me.”
I’m not alone in my peppering of glamour over what is otherwise a lot of hard work. “People imagine that being an editor-in-chief is a very glamorous job, thanks in no small part to iconic characters like Miranda Priestly, played impeccably by screen goddess Meryl Streep,” says Bourdillon. “I hate to shatter anyone’s illusions, but being the EIC of an independent queer magazine is not remotely like that. There are grand, sparkly moments, for sure, but there’s also a hell of a lot of hard graft and the constant challenge of trying to create meaningful, exciting media with a tiny team on a shoestring budget. Also, outrageously, I get sent literally no free clothes!”
As an editor-in-chief, does she relate to Miranda Priestly? “The thing about Miranda I relate to most is how deeply she cares about even the tiniest aspect of her work,” Bourdillon points out. “That combination of razor-sharp attention to detail and big, bold creative vision – I think all good EICs have that. What I definitely do not relate to (apart from the abundance of free designer gear) is the way she treats her staff.”
When I used to write for Attitude, people would say things like “it’s the job a million gays would kill for” perhaps signally the significance of the movie in contemporary queer culture, and the attachment some within our community have with LGBTQ+ publications. “There were photo-shoots, cover features, late night emailing, sometimes feeling as if the job had become your whole life at the expense of everything else,” recalls James of his time at Attitude, adding that the film presents a glamorising and dramatised version of life in a magazine. Whilst he relates to Andy’s character, he tells me that his experience was not nearly as dramatic. “But I had a blast! Yes, there were plenty of challenges, it was at the time a small team and budgets were tight but being a part of something that mattered to my community, like Attitude, was so rewarding and has given me the foundation to do what I’m doing now.”
Putting my invitations to fashion weeks in Paris, London and Milan to one side, the motivation to tell LGBTQ+ people’s stories is what keeps me going. Throughout my ten years in journalism, I’ve had the privilege of writing about several LGBTQ+ topics, as well as interviewing LGBTQ+ people about their experiences. I think it’s a huge responsibility, especially at a time when our rights and freedoms continue to be threatened. I’ve sat down at my desk to write an article and burst into tears, burst out laughing, or a combination of the two. But much like what is described in The Devil Wears Prada 2, it sometimes felt like my work just disappeared into the ether.
(Hannah Mittelstaedt/Vada Magazine)There’s no denying the world of journalism has changed exponentially since the first movie. In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the threat to the magazine industry and journalism more broadly looms large, reflecting what’s happening around us today. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was meeting up with two friends who are both journalists. One of them texted an hour before we were due to meet to say he’d just been made redundant, with the second friend having been let go two months prior. They join the scores of journalists who have been made redundant this year. Towards the start of my career I was told that “the rug can be pulled out from under you at any time” and I’m afraid to say that for journalists today it’s not if, but when this will happen.
Now twenty years on from the original movie, I’ve watched the sequel through eyes that have been opened a little wider by this industry. My heart still loves magazines and journalism, in spite of the heartbreak this industry has sometimes caused me. But I don’t dare dream of what will happen to our profession in another twenty years – I don’t think any of us can say for sure. Instead, I’m going to focus on remembering that just being able to write and publish these words is a privilege. The Devil Wears Prada 2 feels at times painfully close to the reality of being a journalist today, yet I would argue it is the love letter to journalism that we all need. I might have stopped dreaming about a glamorous career in magazines, however, my drive to tell LGBTQ+ stories has never been stronger. That’s all.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is out in cinemas now. Our latest digital cover was photographed by Hannah Mittelstaedt and styled by Hannah Garside. Follow Vada on Instagram, for more exclusive shots from our cover shoot.
