The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the sequel to a film that launched a thousand memes.
For the film’s New York premiere in April 2026, fashion designer Evan Hirsh decided to commemorate one of the original 2006 film’s most celebrated scenes. He embroidered Meryl Streep’s infamous monologue on the fictional fashion history of the colour cerulean into the bright blue train of his coat.
In the monologue, ice-queen fashion editor Miranda Priestly (Streep) lambasts ingenue Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) for her ignorance about the blue – I mean, cerulean – colour of her sweater.
Equal parts derisive and incisive, this monologue nods to the “ballroom” tradition of reading the flaws of others, in order to deliver a devastating (and often hilarious) insult. Ballroom is an underground scene of competitive balls created by Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ communities centred on dance, fashion and performance. There, reading functions as both art form and social critique.
The monologue also encapsulates a skill practised in humanities classrooms around the world: close reading. This is the art of unpacking a detail and contextualising it within a broader history, to see how artistic choices and media landscapes come together to shape the world around us – often without us really noticing.
Although an old idea (arguably, even Aristotle was doing it), in the early decades of the 20th century, literary scholars in Britain and America began to emphasise the skills we now know as close reading. They argued that small details and specific choices come together to create the reader’s experience of the text.
In 2006, to see close reading on-screen was rare. Prior to the rise of social media, virtuosic displays of close readings were often confined to academic settings, or the occasional documentary. Now, close reading can be found everywhere in our content diets – in podcasts, YouTube videos and on TikTok.
Close reading proves an ideal technique for generating constant content. It allows creators to unpack artistic choices and the aesthetic histories of just about anything.
Some of this content presents itself as educational programming, making use of expert academic hosts (for example, in Architectural Digest’s series Every Detail or the London Review of Books’ podcast Close Readings).
These podcasts and videos form part of the history of post-war educational media, along with Open University programming that used to fill the BBC airwaves in the early hours. Contributors to this programming included Stuart Hall, whose criticism defined the field of Cultural Studies by melding historical analysis with questions of how media such as TV and film communicate with viewers.
Expertise in close reading, however, does not lie only within academia. Close readings can be found in fashion content that highlights the history of specific items, such as the 99% Invisible podcast Articles of Interest. And they’re also evident in the videos of influencers who examine the history of specific looks and the publications that shaped them.
Videos and podcasts on pop music and culture hosted by musicologists, such as Vulture’s Switched on Pop, also rely on close reading. Fan videos and tweets unpacking the work of singers like Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter perform this same skill.
Every video breaking down the difference between gen Z and millennial makeup, every outfit takedown, every analysis of a political speech – close reading is everywhere.
Close reading in The Devil Wears Prada
Let’s return to that blue sweater. While fashion editors have debunked the scene’s representation of how the fashion industry operates, that is not what is at stake for the characters. This scene dramatises the allure of shared cultural knowledge. This kind of knowledge represents what it takes to succeed at the fictional Runway magazine.
By understanding and valuing the history of a colour, Andy could become part of a glamorous in group. Now, our phones contain our own personal Miranda Priestlys, explaining how and why an object, an image, a text matters – and perhaps why we should buy it.
The Met Gala, an annual evening of fundraising for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is always a key date in the close-reading calendar. The event exemplifies what art and music has always done for its wealthy patrons and consumers: it provides an opportunity to see and be seen, to participate in the performance of connoisseurship.
Former Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the perennially sunglasses-clad inspiration for Priestly, helped make first Monday in May (when the gala is held) a covetable event in the fashion calendar. Days after the theatrical release of the Devil Wears Prada 2 in May 2026, a flurry of content will emerge close reading the outfit choices at the gala.
The message of the cerulean monologue is that culture, and the business of culture, exempts no one. Simply because we do not care about a certain aspect of culture does not mean we can escape its influence.
Like the blue of Andy Sach’s sweater, the act of close reading “represents millions of dollars and countless jobs”, and probably more hours of your own time than you would care to admit. Perhaps most importantly, close reading is the skill that enables us to unpack art’s political statements.
So, in case you had any doubt, it’s important that you know: it’s not just blue, it’s cerulean.
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