The Devil Wears Amazon: How Jeff Bezos became an unexpected force in fashion

A lot has changed since The Devil Wears Prada was released two decades ago, not least fashion. The 2006 film portrayed a landscape that is almost unrecognizable today, no matter how you look at it. But if that first film became a cult movie, X-raying aspirational capitalism, the sequel focuses on satirizing the most unlikely routes that the luxury industry and glossy magazines have gone down since.

In the last two decades, fashion has become a financial asset, but also a source of entertainment. In fact, it is just another piece of content to be consumed during sofa-based scrolling sessions — sessions that will be combined with the viewing of the sequel when it arrives on platforms (it will be available on Disney+). The screenwriters know this, and they have liberally scattered the footage with cameos and references designed to become memes. If in the first film it was difficult for important names to be added to the footage, with only Valentino Garavani and Gisele Bündchen daring, in this version, there are more celebrities than adorn a red carpet, with the list including Marc Jacobs, Donatella Versace, Lady Gaga, Karolina Kurkova, Heidi Klum, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, Tina Brown, and Law Roach.

In 2006, no one wanted to be associated with a movie that was considered radioactive. Based on Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 book of the same name, the story immortalized an all-powerful and megalomaniac magazine editor played by Meryl Streep and inspired by Anna Wintour, editor of the U.S. edition of Vogue (Weisberger was her assistant for a few months). Twenty years ago, everyone feared Anna Wintour, but the general public did not know her. Today, it is the other way around. She has become a familiar face in popular culture, and that is partly thanks to the book and the film. She knows this and is already bluntly ironic about it, posing in Prada with Meryl Streep for the cover of the May issue of the magazine she now coordinates as global director of content for all Condé Nast publications.

The film portrays that change, but it also touches on all the themes that have defined these past years. One storyline stands out for its prescience: the budding love affair between the technooligarchs and the fashion world, a recent turn embodied by a character with unmistakable echoes of Jeff Bezos. The Silicon Valley gurus have come out of their garages and given up the nerdy hoodies. Now they visit the White House and seek to conquer the fashion industry with their checkbooks, aware of its cultural power. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were the guests of honor at Prada’s latest fashion show. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, were the talk of the town when they attended several haute couture shows in Paris. And next Monday, the couple is set for their coronation as visual power brokers when they serve as hosts of the Met Gala.

Organized by Anna Wintour, the Met Gala raises funds for the Metropolitan Museum’s fashion wing. Apart from being one of the highest-profile events of the year, those who climb the carpeted stairs of the museum can consider themselves social highfliers. At least they could until now.

“In her quest to raise more money each year, Anna has made the ticket prices so expensive that just about nobody can afford them except tech companies,” Amy Odell, Wintour’s biographer, wrote in a post called The Met Gala is Now the Tech Gala. “This influx of tech money at the gala has eroded its cool factor.”

For the ultra‑rich, however, tickets to the Met Gala are a trivial expense: “In 2025, the event raised $31 million which, proportionally, means about as much to Jeff Bezos as $10 does to a median American household with an $80,000 income,” Odell points out.

In other words, it’s a small price to pay for the validation — and the female audience — they’re after, achieved by sponsoring the gala or securing a front‑row seat.

Fashion needs the tech billionaires and vice versa, because the tech bros yearn for the cultural cachet and aspirational aura of the luxury industry. The Devil Wears Prada 2 includes a billionaire founder of a technology company who has just divorced his long-time wife. After going through his own glow-up, he becomes obsessed with longevity and a new girlfriend, and sets out to buy Runway — the film’s stand‑in for Vogue — as a gift for her.

Premonition or caricature? Hard to say. The script was drafted in 2024, and last summer rumors swirled that Bezos was planning to buy Vogue as a wedding present for his future wife (or as his next toy after discarding the last one). Condé Nast, the publisher that owns the century‑old magazine, denied the chatter, but on social media, some see the company’s latest round of cuts — announced just days ago — as a strategic clean‑up ahead of a potential sale.

Perhaps the answer lies in the film, because reality often outpaces fiction — though some art captures, with surprising clarity, the more grotesque turns certain sectors are taking.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 also touches on the precariousness of journalism, the tyranny of clicks and the attention economy, the role of fashion houses and the demise of advertising, the transformation of magazines into global brands, the shift in mentality among the young, online hate speech, the waning power of editors… What doesn’t evolve in the slightest is the narrative around work and ambition, which feels even more outdated than in the first film. The moral? It arrives wrapped in sequins and perched on stilettos: to succeed at work, you must sacrifice your personal life. The film delivers it without a hint of critique or irony — quite the opposite, in fact, presenting it as an aspirational ideal.

Other messages in the film are not so obvious, though they speak volumes about today’s systemic contradictions. The script nods to body diversity through a few lines of dialogue and a token character — a gesture that seems designed to satisfy the demands of political correctness. Yet Anne Hathaway plays Andy Sachs with the kind of body currently trending on red carpets: rail thin.

The film also acknowledges how magazines have lost power to brands — an obvious fact — and portrays the former as subservient to the latter. But the scenes meant to illustrate this elevate labels from the LVMH conglomerate into storylines of their own.

Nothing is accidental in a sequel with a budget north of $100 million, according to Variety. Dior is practically a supporting character, and a Tiffany & Co. jewelry store becomes a key setting in one of the sequences, underscoring how luxury houses have also become patrons of film and television.

All the scenes seem conceived to become reels. The same happens with the wardrobe, which is the work of Molly Rogers. It is excessive and overwhelming and forgettable and brings to mind those scrolling sessions in which time passes, but nothing much registers.

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