The Devil Wears Prada

A million girls would kill for her job. Or even just for those shoes! Andy Sachs doesn’t know how lucky she is to find herself, almost by accident, as the personal assistant to the “queen” of the New York fashion scene, Miranda Priestly.
Miranda (Meryl Streep) controls the production of Runway magazine and decides what’s next in fashion. As she explains to the naive Andy (Anne Hathaway), even the colour of the highly unfashionable sweater Andy is wearing was chosen by Miranda three or four years earlier. That colour has eventually trickled down through the fashion industry to whatever discount outlet Andy had found it in.
Andy doesn’t really see what all the fuss is about. She’s just here until she can get a job as a real journalist. She doesn’t even know how to spell Dolce & Gabana! Her fashion cluelessness is horrific to those she works with, while she laughs with her friends about the “clackers,” referring to the sound of their high heels as they scurry around the Runway office at Miranda’s bidding.
As Andy gets better at figuring out how to satisfy Miranda’s many demands, she starts to feel a bit more comfortable. But she still looks like a low-budget fashion tragedy, dahling!
She realises the clothes she’s been wearing are a liability to her acceptance into the world she’s found herself becoming a part of. If she wants to be successful in this job she has to do something about it.
She has befriended Runway fashion guru Nigel (Stanley Tucci), who becomes her personal stylist. He opens the Runway wardrobe to Andy, and her mind to the world of high fashion. She looks fabulous, but to her friends and family its starting to feel like she’s getting a bit caught up in it all. Their time together with Andy is always under the threat of a phone call from Miranda.
The expectations and responsibility Andy feels are making her job all consuming. She feels torn, but there are important things to do and people to meet and the phone is ringing again—and all these great clothes! It’s a glamorous, seductive world. In a telling scene her boyfriend observes to her that “the person whose phone calls you always take is the person you’re in a relationship with.”
It’s not just about answering the phone, but a challenge that can be applied to all of our lives. There are plenty of things we can get caught up in. Sometimes it’s a good thing, but at times we can lose hold of what is really important. Even things that are good in them selves can take over everything else and damage our friendships, our integrity and our faith.
Not many of us have that one significant moment in our lives where, Homer Simpson-like, we trade our soul for a doughnut. But The Devil Wears Prada plays out a much more common scenario. It’s a subtle creeping change for Andy to become one of the “clackers.” And no single step on that path seems to be that much of a compromise. But it’s a shock when she finally realises how much she has changed.
“What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?”* What’s that important? What takes up my time? Whose phone calls do I always take?

*Matthew 16:26, The Message