I saw Devil Wears Prada 2 over the weekend with some moms from my cul de sac.
I had never spent time with this particular group of women before, yet they made for the perfect ensemble: one is a full-time working mom, an executive at a publicly traded company. One is studying to become a nutritionist. And the one who brought us all together is a capable, accomplished woman who chose to step away from her career to focus on raising her kids while her husband works as a consultant. Completely different life experiences. Completely different choices.
All of us in the same rideshare, heading home after 9pm with our Siskel and Ebert brains ready for bed, not debate. So, I'll have to weigh in here first.
My takeaway: millennial women grew up believing love and careers and kids could coexist. All in harmony. That the life we were building, the job, the marriage, the children, the identity we'd never have to negotiate, was possible. Promised, even.
The movie shows us it's not.
I think I wanted to be Anna Wintour when I was growing up. Not Miranda Priestley. Anna. I always saw Anna as warmer, more acclimated to the outside world, more of a quiet assassin in the pursuit of excellence versus an outright deadly one. When I was a hostess at Balthazar one summer during college, I saw her often. I clocked the silhouette. The bob. The way she could walk into a room and make every atom in it rearrange itself. That felt like a position of power worth wanting.
And then there's Diane Keaton as J.C. Wiatt in Baby Boom. If you haven't seen it, you need to. Or you need to see it again with the eyes you have now. J.C. names herself like a man. Dresses like one in her power suit. Carries a briefcase and a baby on the same hip. The baby isn't even planned; she inherits a 14-month-old from a distant cousin who dies suddenly, and what follows is a masterclass in duty and reinvention. She gets fired from her consulting job. She moves to Vermont. Her baby refuses commercially produced applesauce so she starts her own brand. She finds success by accepting that her life has changed, adapting to that change, and innovating outside the industry that raised her.
J.C. is a case study in doing it all, and in adjusting what "all" looks like when life arrives differently than planned. Baby Boom doesn't resolve the tension between ambition and motherhood. It lets us see they can coexist, messily and triumphantly, as long as we're willing to change our professional archetype along with it.
Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead gave us Sue Ellen Crandell, seventeen years old, holding together an entire household for a summer because she had no other option. Mom left for Europe, not for work but for vacation, with her boyfriend, and the babysitter, who appeared close to her grave the day she arrived, died days after her mother departed. The grocery money evaporated. The younger siblings were feral. Sue Ellen, the oldest, did what competent women in movies were always shown doing: she improvised. She lied her way into a corporate fashion director job she was wildly underqualified for, thrived at it, and kept everyone fed.
The premise is played for laughs. But what's underneath isn't funny at all. Mom got to go to Europe. The competent daughter got to become an accidental teenage executive.
That was the instruction manual all of us women born in the 80s were handed. You can figure it out. Women are resourceful. You'll be fine.
We believed it because it felt true. Because we wanted it to be.
Then comes Devil Wears Prada 2, and it gives us just the job.
We are immersed in a cross-generational portrait of two women who embody the idea that work is life. Miranda chose her career, unapologetically; she even says nothing makes her happier than working. It felt good to hear a woman admit that, even in 2026, when that admission still carries stigma. Andy chose a less brutal version of it. Or perhaps her warmth just makes it look that way.
Love made for undesirable side plots, romance that felt superfluous, divorce that's anything but amicable. The life outside the office exists mostly as transitional cinematic fluff, wreckage or absence.
Where are their friends? Their family? Their community that exists outside of their shared obsession with preserving journalism within capitalist confines?
The film showed us a woman's successful career in black and white terms, while all of us navigate a grey world we can't fully name. It didn't solve our inner, shared conflict. It punctuated it. At least for me.
But here's what the film doesn't tell us: Anna Wintour went to the 2025 Met Gala…with her kids.
Anna's son, Charles, was born in 1985, and her daughter, Bee, in 1987. I sit between them in age, and I paid more attention to Bee, because, girls.
At the 2025 Gala, centered on menswear, dress code "Tailored for You," Bee stunned in a black gown, Anna beside her in white with a subtly blue overcoat, Charles beside them in black tie, his wife in a beautiful periwinkle number that quietly echoed Anna's overcoat. All five of them, together, in one of the most watched rooms in the world. Not a cast. A family.
That image is doing something the film doesn't do.
In 2014, Bee told Grazia that despite her mother's reputation, her upbringing was centered on family values, and that Anna would put everyone else before herself. "She's also efficient," Bee said. "She gets bored easily and wants to get things done. But, she's a boss."
That's a daughter describing her mother with admiration. Not distance. Not damage. Admiration.
Anna is now a grandmother of three. All of them call her "Anna," not Grandma, not Gigi, not Ya Ya, not any of the names boomer women have built new identities around as grandmothers in their collective fight against aging. Just Anna. It's not cold. It's just her. The same economy of self she brings to every room, every relationship, every table. It fits.
Here is what the film wants us to believe: that Miranda Priestley represents the inevitable cost of choosing ambition. Lonely. Magnificent. Cold.
Here is what Anna shows us that Miranda did not. Two children on her arm. Perhaps they weren't on her hip in the front row of Chanel's Milan fashion show as toddlers, but they're there as grown adults, by choice. They are in it for the long haul: supporting their mother as their mom, and supporting the most revered woman in publishing as an icon.
Maybe the movie isn't telling us we can't have it all. Maybe it just couldn't figure out how to dramatize the version where you do.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be present with my children while they're young. And the reason I work so hard at that presence now is because I want them there when I'm older. I want them at my equivalent of the 2025 Met Gala, with their partners and children in tow, the whole ensemble. I always want my children to be part of my ensemble cast.
Anna shows us it's possible.
Now, look at what mass media is offering millennial mothers at this exact moment.
On one end: Miranda Priestley. Career as a religion. Every personal relationship is a casualty.
On the other: born-again SAHMs. The Ballerina Farm phenomenon. Hannah Neeleman, former Juilliard ballet student, wife of a Utah farmer who is also a JetBlue heir, mother of eight, posting videos of herself making bread in a Doen-esque dress and milking cows in a gingham apron. She's doing one thing, the home, and making it so beautiful it has its own aesthetic ideology. The bravery of stepping back to own motherhood and the household only gets announced, it seems, once you've successfully built a $100M brand empire from doing so.
Nothing in between.
Yet we are the mothers living in the in between. The ones who were told, not warned, told, that we could have it all. It was in the movies, the magazines, the lean-in discourse, the girlboss era, and the job descriptions our college degrees desired. We believed it because we wanted it to be true, and because we worked hard enough to make the first half of it happen.
We got the job. We got the kids. We got the marriage, or the divorce, or the very complicated version of both. We got the house and the school district and the schedule that requires a project manager and two backup plans.
We have it all. And yet, I think, we are the most disoriented generation of mothers in modern history.
85% of mothers leave the full-time workforce within three years of having their first child. Three years. That's when the second child arrives, or almost does. When the childcare bill exceeds the mortgage. When you do the math on your salary minus childcare minus the mental load and the number comes back wrong. That's the reckoning; not at birth, not at maternity leave, but quietly, around year three, when the life you built before the baby doesn't quite fit anymore and nobody has a plan for that.
Because nobody told us that having it all means holding all of it, simultaneously, with no instructions for what to put down. And because nobody is showing us — in film, in media, in culture — what it looks like when a woman in the middle figures it out.
Not Miranda. Not Hannah Neeleman. Not a reality show. Just a woman, building something, showing up, staying.
Anna Wintour has been doing it for fifty years. Her kids are on her arm to prove it.
The film built a myth out of the woman. The woman behind the character built a life that's perhaps more accurate of what we desire.
Is Devil Wears Prada 2 the uncomfortable reality check we needed? A permission slip for the next generation to go hungry after work if that's what drives them? A cautionary tale? All three at once?
I don't know. I think so. I'm still doing circles.
What I keep coming back to is that image: Anna and her family at the Met Gala. The grandmother who built the empire. The daughter who built something of her own. The son and his wife, coordinating to Anna's blue. The grandchildren at home who call their grandmother by her first name because that's just who she is and always has been.
Miranda is the myth. Anna is the data point.
And the data point is: she did it. Not without cost. Not without the ice queen reputation that her own daughter had to go on record to uncomplicate. But her kids were always there. And, they stayed. That says more than we are noticing.
We're the generation who got told we could have everything, and then had to figure out, mid-stride, with children on our hips and inboxes full, what having everything actually costs.
And, I think, we're all still yearning to see women like us who pull it off. The relatable ones. Not the movie star version.
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peace is in you