New movie gets business of fashion right

In 'The Devil Wears Prada,' It's Not Couture, It's Business (With Accessories) -- by GINIA BELLAFANTE

IN one scene in the new movie "The Devil Wears Prada," the heroine, Andy Sachs, who serves as slave and coat rack for her boss, Miranda Priestly, receives a visit from her concerned Midwestern father. He arrives in New York and pummels his daughter with questions: he wants to know why she is often stuck at the office until 2 a.m., even though she is just an assistant; why her boss calls during dinner; why, given her acceptance to Stanford Law School, she chose to pursue a career in journalism; and why now she isn't even doing that, because Runway magazine, where she works, isn't, after all, The American Prospect.

"The Devil Wears Prada," which is set to open June 30, is based on the best-selling novel of the same name, written by Lauren Weisberger, who worked as an assistant at Vogue and mined the experience to depict fashion magazines as cauldrons of Peronist management style and self-enchantment. Andy (played by Anne Hathaway ) was once an earnest young woman who might have invoked the word "crisis" to describe wars and car accidents. But she is so ensorcelled by Miranda, Runway's harridan editor ( Meryl Streep ), that she now uses it when harm befalls a set of accessories. In all of this her father finds great cause for lament.

From 1999 to 2004 I wrote about fashion as a reporter and critic for this newspaper. When I called my mother to tell her that her only child was going to earn a living analyzing the meaning of clothes, I think she considered adoption. I defended my decision on the grounds that it was an opportunity to think instructively about gender and class and produce the sort of broad cultural criticism I had come to admire most. Another opportunity the fashion beat affords is plenty of time spent in the company of fashion people, something variously dreadful and exhilarating. Disciples of the fashion tribe will surely say "The Devil Wears Prada" exaggerates their manners and proclivities. It doesn't. The movie is easily the truest portrayal of fashion culture since "Unzipped," the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi .

But that film depicted fashion in what amounts to another era, the twilight moment before it was dominated by a handful of multibillion dollar brands with little appreciation for whimsy. "The Devil Wears Prada" is the first film to take a 21st-century view of fashion, moving beyond the myth of its practitioners as visionaries, revealing them instead as the exacting functionaries they are: those who live and dress and think according to the seasonal edicts of global conglomerates.

In the mainstream fashion world the movie depicts, no one wears square-toed shoes in the presence of someone who might disapprove of square-toed shoes. A fashion editor might not genuinely crave the new pump of the hour, but she worries how devalued she'll be if she doesn't get it. The filmmakers understand that fashion people don't possess artistic souls but actuarial ones, that they are energized more by fear than by desire.

"The Devil Wears Prada" also gets that fashion people are ambitious, but their ambition is a kind no one outside their world would recognize. Andy — who was attracted to journalism as a way to right social wrongs — finds her colleagues baffling. Among them is Emily ( Emily Blunt ), another one of Miranda's assistants, who works to the point of mental collapse all in the service of her goal to one day accompany Miranda to the couture shows in Paris. Emily forfeits her personal life completely for a job she sees as no less demanding or significant than any at the Department of Homeland Security . To her Andy lacks drive because she wears chain-store loafers, poly-blend knits and skirts that seem to Emily to come from "some hideous skirt convention." Emily reminded me of any number of young women I met who combined a Calvinist work ethic with status-consciousness so intense that they cried or broke down if their seats at fashion shows were not in the very front row.

When the majority of designers, stylists, editors, assistants and publicists I encountered weren't talking about pretty clothes, they were talking about pretty houses: Karl Lagerfeld's place in Biarritz, the Ferragamo villa in Tuscany. During the seasonal collections in Europe, they eat at the same three or four restaurants in Milan (da Giacomo) and Paris (Voltaire or Costes ). They all go to the same place on vacation. One year everyone is off to Capri, and the next they have opened their communal atlas and discovered Bhutan.

At one point in the movie Nigel, Runway's art director (played by Stanley Tucci as a contemptuous mentor who sees Andy as an eyesore at a size 6), chastises her for not knowing that the magazine "published some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Halston! Oscar de la Renta !" That seemed off, but I could easily imagine a real-life version of Nigel — two or three real-life versions of him — pronouncing that they had published the great artists of the 20th century, Damien Hirst and Damian Loeb.

Once a publicist for a talked-about young New York designer told me she expected her client's forthcoming runway show to be "devastational." By this she meant that its impact would be devastating in the manner, say, of Duchamp at the Armory Show. In the end it was merely devastating in the manner of making you want to shop at Lands' End.

"The Devil Wears Prada," directed by David Frankel, doesn't bow to the cliché that all fashion people are airheads. It accurately suggests that often they are like the most impressive baseball fans, ambulatory statistics banks who can recall that the fourth "look" to come down the runway in the spring 1986 Yves St. Laurent show was a bolero with a roped shoulder and cheetah-print lining and that it was worn by a model named Hermonie who later moved to Sweden and got into hydroponics.

Disdainful at first, Andy eventually develops affection for the people around her. And she falls in love with the clothes, a development I am inclined to view as completely realistic because I did too. Fashion does not easily accommodate ambivalence. And Andy is too hungry (metaphorically but also literally because of course at Runway you don't eat) to stay put. She ultimately interviews for a journalism job at a publication that resembles The Village Voice, circa 1990. "The Devil Wears Prada" is one of the few fashion films ever made that asks us not to celebrate fashion but to disdain it. Andy could have been Diana Vreeland, but she is going to be Nat Hentoff — or Nat Hentoff with better boots.