The ‘Devil Wears Prada 2’ Italy Fashion Montage Was Almost Cut, and the Story Behind Its Last-Minute Rescue Is Everything
Few fashion moments in modern cinema carry the kind of cultural weight that the original ‘Devil Wears Prada’ managed to lock in with a single song and a series of impossibly chic outfits. When Madonna’s “Vogue” scored Anne Hathaway’s transformation across Manhattan back in 2006, it became one of those rare sequences that people could picture frame by frame decades later. The montage became so embedded in pop culture that Emily Blunt recently revealed future husband John Krasinski played her the scene early in their relationship to show off his favorite of Andy’s looks.
The sequel reunites Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway alongside Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, this time centering on Miranda Priestly’s battle with her former assistant turned rival executive as declining print media closes in around her. The story sends Andy and Miranda jetting to Milan for Fashion Week, where the magazine’s editorial budget has been gutted by a new tech-bro CEO played by B.J. Novak. With that backdrop, expectations for a fashion spectacle were always going to be sky high.
The surprise is that the film’s most dazzling sequence in Italy was never part of the plan. Director David Frankel told Variety that the creative team “specifically didn’t do a montage in the first iterations of the script, to not repeat ourselves,” but that as production moved forward and the Milan shoot approached, he began to feel the weight of audience expectation and pushed to add it back in. It was Anne Hathaway who ultimately made the case, reminding the team that fans were going to be waiting for exactly that kind of fashion payoff.
What followed was a full-scale scramble. Frankel explained that the production had to go back to the studio and ask for one more day of shooting because of the new idea, with costume designer Molly Rogers suddenly needing to pull together an entirely expanded set of looks for not just Andy but also Miranda, new assistant Amari played by Simone Ashley, and Nigel played by Stanley Tucci. Frankel described it as a situation where the assistant directors had to find additional extras, the team needed to lock in three new locations across Milan, and Rogers had to work through what she called a “bit of a scramble” to assemble everything in time.
Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna explained the thematic intention behind the expanded montage, saying the sequence was designed to reflect that fashion is genuinely these characters’ workplace, and that donning couture each morning is their version of putting on a uniform before the workday begins. That framing gives the sequence a different emotional texture from the original, where the clothes represented Andy’s transformation and assimilation into a world she hadn’t chosen.
The Milan shoot itself required roughly 2,000 extras, all sourced from the city’s professional fashion and communications industries to keep the scenes feeling authentic to the real Fashion Week environment. The result landed at a $77 million domestic opening weekend, with the film powering to $233 million worldwide. Audiences clearly had no complaints about the detour to Italy.
It is a testament to how much pressure a beloved franchise carries that even the people making the sequel felt compelled to course-correct mid-shoot and fight for a moment they had originally decided to leave out. Whether you think the montage earns its place or that the original will never be topped, it is worth sharing your take in the comments.
