chief agent of change. Instead it stresses its time-based, natural and
inevitable maturation theme; this is not Cinderella but, as Vincent Canby
further notes in the Motion Picture Herald review, ‘a variation on the uglyduckling-into-beautiful-swan
theme’ (2045).
The film further reinforces the ease by which Calam transitions from
a tomboy to a woman by allowing her to remain in masculine (albeit
immaculate) attire. But this decision also leaves open the loophole of
androgyny that the narrative’s drive towards appropriate female behaviour
and goals might have hoped to secure.
Here we can again see in action Jane Gaines’ argument from
Fabrications, that the dominant and costume narratives in films can be in
conflict. The dominant narrative trajectory takes the grubby female yahoo
and attempts to tame her, educating her to approved 1950s standards of
female conduct, which necessitates her leaving behind the unfitting
masculine occupation and the clothes that go with it. The costume
narrative, by contrast, and however ambivalently, permits her to maintain
a level of androgyny that seems out of step with contemporaneous
assumptions about polite female manners and looks. By situating the
emotional climax of the film, not in the hastily mounted wedding
scene (occupying just two minutes of the film’s duration), but in the
‘Secret Love’ number, both longer and more emotionally rich than the
wedding, the costume narrative showcases Calam’s apogee while she is
still in trousers.
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
Synopsis
Andrea ‘Andy’ Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a recent college graduate hoping
to become a journalist, is interviewed for a job on Runway magazine, even
though she knows and cares nothing about fashion. The Editor In Chief,
Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), of whom everyone in the office is
terrified, ignores the reservations her First Assistant Emily (Emily Blunt)
has about Andy and hires her as Second Assistant. Although she is scornful
of the whole concept of fashion, when Andy is told by Emily that just one
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year working for Miranda guarantees any job in journalism, she determines
to hold out.
Despite Miranda’s impossible personality, Andy commits herself to
the job, but does not seem to gain any ground. Her boyfriend, friends and
family all tell her to quit since she is so unhappy, but she refuses. Nigel
(Stanley Tucci), Runway’s art director tells her that although she works
hard, her superior attitude to fashion and those who love it holds her back.
Andy realises this is true and begs Nigel to help her show she is committed
by making her look like a Runway girl. Newly groomed, fashionably
outfitted and accessorised, Andy begins to make a success of the job, but
her relationship with her boyfriend suffers, and they split up.
The highlight of the First Assistant’s year is to be taken to Paris for
Fashion Week. Emily gets terrible flu but insists on going, until Andy is
offered the trip by Miranda – if she tells Emily the bad news. Andy
complies when, running errands for Miranda, Emily is hit by a car and
hospitalised. Emily, on crutches, is left behind as Miranda, Andy and Nigel
fly off to France.
Returning to her suite one evening Andy finds Miranda tearful, and
the woman reveals a rare vulnerability as she admits her husband is
divorcing her. Andy offers her sympathy but Miranda’s froideur takes over
again. Still feeling bad for her boss, Andy is getting ready for a date with
Christian Thompson (Simon Baker), a young writer, when Nigel comes to
tell her his big news: he will soon be leaving, becoming President of a new
company for a global brand, with Miranda’s blessing.
After dinner, Andy and Christian end up in bed together. The next
morning Andy discovers a mocked-up Runway cover – the woman for
whom Christian is working, Jacqueline Follet, is planning to oust Miranda
and take over the magazine. Andy rushes to warn her but Miranda has
already dealt with the plot – by giving Jacqueline Nigel’s new job. Andy
expresses her surprise at Miranda’s ruthlessness, sacrificing Nigel’s dreams,
but her boss calmly says Andy is capable of equally selfish behaviour: didn’t
she replace Emily on the Paris trip? Andy is horrified and realises how far
she has come from her original goals and standards. She leaves Miranda
and returns home to America.
Andy attends another job interview, this time for a writing job on a
New York paper. The Editor asks why she was at Runway, and Andy
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truthfully replies the experience taught her a lot. In any case, the Editor
says, she must have impressed Miranda, who has provided a glowing
reference. Happily hired, Andy is walking back through Manhattan when
she sees Miranda getting into her limousine. Though she offers a hesitant
wave, Miranda seems to ignore her; alone inside the car, however, the
demon boss reveals a small smile.
Contexts
If The Bride Wore Red and Calamity Jane were easy to see as products, of
and tapping into, their specific contemporary contexts, it is more difficult
to place The Devil Wears Prada in a similar historical and societal milieu,
since the film is only four years old at the time of writing. What we lose by
not having the detachment of distance, however, we gain in being able to
pinpoint specific influences which might, with time, otherwise become
lost. In other words, The Devil Wears Prada can still be advanced as a piece
of mid-noughties zeitgeist before the passage of time reveals the particular
socio-cultural resonances this specific time has.
Examination of the film’s references leads in several different
directions: while the Crawford vehicle clearly spoke to and of her persona
and the Depression, and Day’s film can be read in terms of her star image
and specific 1950s notions of appropriate female behaviour and appearance,
it is not so easy to isolate the most dominant influence on The Devil Wears
Prada. As with the two earlier texts, a large amount of the context for the
film centres around the actor playing the central character, but the
collaboration of the film’s stylist and director on a previous celebrated
project, the film’s status as adaptation of a best-seller and the
contemporaneous glut of television makeover shows also fed into the film
and its reception. These various facets of pressure on the text will be
considered in turn.
Casting Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs sent a very clear message to
potential audience members: the film would contain a major sartorial
metamorphosis. Given the book’s focus on fashion and the reversal of
fortunes enjoyed by the heroine once she has succumbed to the highglamour
world of Runway, this casting can be seen as an example of what
Richard Dyer (1979) calls ‘perfect fit’: the actor fits the role so closely that
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there is no tension between her star persona and the character she is
playing (145). Putting Hathaway, already associated with costume-based
transformations, into a ‘makeover movie’ reinforced the film’s narrative
trajectory even before filming started. Hathaway’s association with
transformation began with her first film role, The Princess Diaries (2001)
– Mia Thermopolis, finding herself the heir to a European crown,
metamorphoses to befit this status. Hathaway has built on this so that her
star persona now reflects the concept of ‘the makeover’, with this term
relating not only to what will happen in her films, but across her films
too. While undergoing makeovers in her roles has become a dominant
part of her star persona, her presence in a film can also be seen as itself
initiating change, as with the biopic of Jane Austen (‘Plain Jane’s life gets a
sexy makeover for the screen’ – Stone, 2007: C8). Lately also, negotiating
the transition from teen to adult star, she can be seen making over her
career from one type of role to another.
Another of the main factors feeding into contemporary reception of
The Devil Wears Prada was the combination of the film’s director, David
Frankel, and costume designer Patricia Field. Both had worked together
previously on Sex And The City, and viewers aware of this could hope to
find similar elements in the film: an accent on eye-catching, designerbrand
fashions, a concern to follow the female characters’ stories in a
similarly luxe version of Manhattan, and an irreverent approach to sex.
While The Devil Wears Prada may at first seem to disappoint over these
particulars, the film actually does deliver them, albeit in a scaled-down
version. Within its tighter time-span, The Devil Wears Prada weaves
together the stories of Andy, Miranda and Emily, with ensemble scenes
driving much of the film. Although the accent on sex is much reduced
in the film, Andy’s devotion to her job does not deprive her of a sex life,
as she gets to sleep with Christian.
Above all, however, what Field’s name especially connotes is fashion:
she acts as a guarantee that the film will feature lots of outré outfits.
Interestingly, in noting Field’s involvement in the film, some reviewers
felt that she had ‘got it wrong’ when it came to portraying what fashion
journalists actually wore; the reviewer of the Los Angeles Times, observing
Andy wearing a toe ring, protested: ‘no fashion magazine assistant or editor
would don a toe ring. Ever’ (Moore, 2006: E1). To some, these costume
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decisions seemed intended rather than misguided, with the film actually
satirising the world of fashion (Freeman, 61; Premiere9
). Field herself in
the DVD commentary does not allude to any such parodic intention,
however; similarly, newspaper interviews detail her wardrobe decisions
without any suggestion of intent to undermine. As the caption beneath
one photograph of the stylist confirms, Field’s line seems to be: ‘I love
fashion, and I would never do something bad to the industry’ (Avins,
2006: ix). While Booth Moore, who despaired of Field putting Andy in
a toe ring, concluded that The Devil Wears Prada ‘is a film about insiders
that has been costumed for outsiders’ (E1), perhaps, as we will see in the
detailed costume analysis, the film sets up a complex costume narrative
which not all viewers, fashion insiders or otherwise, may have understood.
A further influence on the film was its status as an adaptation of the
2003 Lauren Weisberger roman à clef. An insightful article in The Hollywood
Reporter indicates the book’s part in the film’s potential success:
‘Prada’ offers all sorts of riches for a movie: an established, catchy chicklit
title with a huge female following; a coming-of-age tale about a smart
Cinderella named Andy who undergoes a total makeover; a glamorous
Manhattan fashion magazine setting; and, last but not least, a magnificent
Faustian villain… (Thompson, 2006)
Thompson perceptively points to the fairy-tale aspect (‘Cinderella’)
of the plot as an element of its popularity, as well as understanding that
the movie can be ‘pre-sold’ to the audience who enjoyed the book. Most
of the contemporaneous reviews of the film mentioned the source novel
(Didcock; Portman; Ringel Gillespie; Groen, all 2006), although, again, as
with the costumes by Field, there was debate over whether the film had
honoured or betrayed its source. Rick Groen felt the former: ‘The source
is Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef about her stint at Vogue magazine, a
rather yappy novel whose shrill tone has been somewhat muted in Aline
Brosh McKenna’s adaptation’ (Groen, 2006: 7).
By contrast, The Hollywood Reporter’s view was that the film remained
ambivalent about the high-fashion world it depicted, eventually failing
to condemn it as the book did (Honeycutt, 2006). It seems to me that the
film employs its costume transformation as a way of metamorphosing the
source text. In this way the sartorial transformation becomes a way of
adapting the book and indeed of transforming its message, subverting it
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from an all-out attack on high-fashion consumerism and becoming, as
Honeycutt notes, something much more ambivalent about the potential
of clothing to alter one’s personality and fortune.
The final cultural influence on the film version of The Devil Wears
Prada is the makeover show. Such shows, where ‘ordinary’ members of the
public are aided in their transformations by professionals, attaining by the
end of the episode, a new sense of self-worth, as well as a new face, haircut
or wardrobe, became popular programming from 2002, with the launch of
ABC’s Extreme Makeover. With everything – one’s self, home, car, job,
diet, partner – seemingly appropriate for transformation, the tropes which
have sustained Hollywood metamorphoses for decades might seem to be
given a new currency. It is interesting, then, that some cinematic tropes
carried into the television programmes are given a new twist, and several
of the most definitive are ignored.
The television makeover show plays up what the filmic transformation
often ignores: the work necessary to achieve the transformation itself. By
contrast, the show suppresses what the film often highlights instead: the
shopping and invisible transformations achieved during pans and fades and
covered by music. While so many of the films looked at in this volume
choose to attest the supreme success of the female transformation by a
moment of misrecognition by the important man in the transformee’s life,
this is watered down in the television versions to the ‘No!’ uttered in
disbelief and joy at the heroine’s ‘big reveal’. The most significant omissions
from the television shows are the false transformations and the idea of
ameliorating the glamour. While the films frequently work to show the
specific wardrobe transformation foisted on the central female is not
entirely right for her, and she must find her own comfortable level of
attractiveness, the investment of shows such as Extreme Makeover in highlevel
glamour and expensive, painful and long-term physical changes
renders impossible the ideas of opting out, changing one’s mind, or
modulating alterations to suit personal circumstances; and there must be
no hint that these new selves are actually disguises. While the visual tropes
of the film-based transformation – the use of the staircase as a place to
stage the reveal, the ‘catwalk’ moment as the newly made woman pauses
and poses for attention, the pan up her body and the occasional use of
slow-motion – may be incorporated into the television series’ menu of
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devices, there are then notable differences in the themes used by films
and television, even though metamorphosis seems to be at the heart of
both of them.
An article by Brenda Weber (2005) subjects Extreme Makeover to the
same unsympathetic scrutiny it imposes on participants.10
Weber examines
the show’s ideological foundations, and traces its language and imagery to
their roots. Significantly, what she attests as the fundamental principles
of the show are often different from those of film transformations; these
differences point to very different engagements with the concepts of
identity, desire and agency at play within television and cinema. Three
points she raises are particularly interesting to our study.
Weber’s first point is that Extreme Makeover also raises the idea of a
‘true self’. However, she sees this concept problematised by the show,
unlike the films which I suggest use it as a type of rescue. Weber quotes
one made-over participant’s assertion – ‘I’m me now!’ (1) – commenting
that the woman’s self-perceived external unattractiveness had caused a
split between her outer and inner selves, her exterior form and interior
identity. Surgery is seen as having healed this split, bringing about unity.
Weber concludes however that because this ‘coherent subjectivity’ (1) is
perceived in terms of ‘outside/in changes’ rather than the reverse, unity
is based only on the surfaces with which the show is obsessed (8), and is
therefore illusory. As I have suggested, the notion that a change of
haircut, makeup or wardrobe could fundamentally change one’s personality
causes the films which portray and valorise such changes considerable
anxiety, an anxiety assuaged, partially, by the idea of the ‘true self’. In this
way, a film transformation is not a making over but a bringing out of
what was always there: not a change so much as a revelation. Extreme
Makeover does not try to work this rhetoric into its shows, Weber suggests,
because its concern with surfaces prohibits the type of interiority the
films rely on evoking.
The two other ideas that Weber raises are that there are national,
and topical, aspects to Extreme Makeover. Since I am specifically studying
Hollywood films, it is interesting that Weber claims there are inherently
American resonances to the show. Weber reads the commitment to
self-change embodied in the willingness to participate in the show as
signalling a determination to strive at attractiveness; this involves not
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only the celebrated American value of hard work, but also a surrender to
capitalist consumerism:
…personal transformation is the first and most necessary step in selfimprovement
and, thus, to a sort of sublime American entitlement… The
commitment to continual makeovers propels a necessary consumerism. (4)
Reflecting on the use of the Cinderella story in the iconography of the
show, Weber calls the makeover ‘one-part fairy tale and one-part American
dream’ (15). She adds that through the power of the metamorphosis,
‘ostracized ugliness [is] brought into meritocracy through glamour’ (15). It
is interesting that Weber sees the obligation to self-transform as the duty of
a loyal American citizen; the ‘sublime American entitlement’ is perhaps
similar to the idea that anyone can grow up to be President of the United
States; equally, anyone can grow up to be beautiful. Lowly birth, religion,
poverty, unattractiveness: none of these need stand in the way of either
ambition, as long as one is prepared to work hard to achieve one’s goals.
While Weber speaks about the ‘democratisation’ of glamour in this way, it
should be noted that this democracy is only open to those who can afford
expensive plastic surgery or are prepared to live with the debts.
If the reward of democratic beauty is that anyone can have it, reversing
the valence of the connection implies that everyone should. Weber offers
the idea of ‘the makeover ultimatum’: ‘if you can change, you should; if you
don’t, accept the consequences’ (5). This can clearly be seen as a message
which carries over to the film world of The Devil Wears Prada, where it is
perceived as part of Andy’s duty to Runway to take fashion seriously enough
to align her image with the corporate one.
This is where the film seems to me to ask a question which Weber
does not touch on, however: if it is an American’s duty to buy into
consumerism, is it equally one’s duty to purchase expensive goods? The
Devil Wears Prada might initially be seen suggesting that designer items
are the desirable ones and it is thus Andy’s responsibility to gain and wear
these. Is this message meant to carry across the cinema screen and be
addressed to audiences also? Perhaps not: as the examination of the
costume narrative will indicate, there are hints that buying haute couture
is not necessarily the patriotic obligation that making the most of oneself
is. It should also be noted that Patricia Field is well known not only for her
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styling of Carrie Bradshaw et al in Sex And The City but also for designing
ranges for budget-price outlets like Payless Shoes.11
Her work with Marks
and Spencer, for a Winter 2008 collection, was dubbed by Field a further
step in ‘my philosophy of “the democratisation of luxury”’ (Barnett, 2008).
The other aspect of Extreme Makeover I think pertinent to The Devil
Wears Prada is Weber’s claim that the show (2002–2008) is particularly
‘now’. She starts by vaguely gesturing to the circumstances of the
programme, what she calls ‘the zeitgeist of anxieties about the body out
of control’ (15); then hones in on a specific event she first indicates, and
then rejects, as the genesis of the show:
Cultural anthropologists have argued that anxieties about policing bodily
excesses are most prevalent in cultures where external boundaries are
under attack… We can see this, quite specifically, in recent US anxieties
over terrorism, punctuated by the attacks on September 11, 2001. Extreme
Makeover debuted in December 2002, and in many ways our collective
emotional investment in the show could be read as a larger hope of
enforcing boundaries… Ultimately however I would argue that the
contentious state of the world is less at issue for Extreme Makeover than
is a deeper investment in our collective desire and anxiety. In many ways,
this form of boundary policing is not about a culture under siege but about
a culture believing itself under siege. (16)
Weber posits that the terrorist attacks on America in September 2001
had a particular impact on the country’s psyche, directly linking the
establishment of the makeover show to the anxieties felt after the country’s
body politic had been damaged. Attempts to control individual bodies on
the show can be read as attempts to exercise power over individuals, making
them whole and united, in order to atone for lacking the power to heal the
country as a whole.
Although Weber steps away from directly attributing the founding
of Extreme Makeover to the events of September 11, I have two thoughts
about this. Firstly, we have seen in this book that metamorphosis through
costume and cosmetic change has been a current theme throughout
Hollywood cinema; there is thus perhaps more permanence to the anxieties
in the American psyche than Weber appreciates.
Secondly, it seems to me that the programme’s insistence on the
importance of consumerism could be read in patriotic terms in the light
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of the events Weber references. It might then be significant that The
Devil Wears Prada spends the majority of its running time in Manhattan,
not only because this is where Andy-original Lauren Weisberger spent her
year indentured to Vogue, but also because New York City needed healing
as the city principally attacked in 2001. Showing a variety of montages,
then, where city street and Central Park become the locale for both
official fashion shoots and Andy’s own impromptu fashion shows, the
film demonstrates patriotic citizens doing their duty by continuing their
commitment to consumerism. That this is an American duty at a time not
only of potential terrorist threat but also economic downturn (Harris, 2009)
does not counteract Weber’s suggestion, but ties it more closely to
quotidian worries than extreme threats.
Influences
The Devil Wears Prada fits easily into the ranks of film transformations
which largely follow the Cinderella story. Clueless Andy labours hard at
her job but cannot be successful – or go to the ball – until Fairy
Godfather Nigel magically transforms her into a chic fashionista. While
the film enjoys its little joke about gay-coded Nigel being a Fairy Godfather,
it also contains other fairy-tale elements, including the heroine forced to
toil (Andy), the haughty evil queen (Miranda) and cruel stepsister (Emily).
Interestingly, however, the film abandons the handsome prince/loyal
commoner conflict (Christian/Nate), leaving the princess to get the right
job rather than the right man at the film’s end.
The film’s employment of fairy-tale elements was not overlooked by
reviewers, with many recognising the Cinderella elements,12
while Barry
Didcock of The Sunday Herald noted also the maturation-element built into
the story which fits also with Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of inevitable
and natural improvement: ‘Anne Hathaway plays “ugly” duckling to Meryl
Streep’s boss from hell’ (2006: 19).
There are divergences, however, from the standard Cinderella tale in
the film, and it is interesting that in this the movie also diverts from the
book. More attention will be paid later to the specific changes the film
wrought on its source material; here it is enough to note that Andy’s
fashion hopelessness in the book is not so simply cured by the access to
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Nigel’s magic Closet and its transformatory clothes. The book also has no
equivalent of the Nigel character, and the film can thus be seen inventing
and shaping his story to create the person of the Fairy Godfather. Further,
Book Andy does not receive one swift lesson in style which she internalises,
as her film equivalent does. In the section of the novel where Miranda
and her entourage go to Paris for the fashion shows, Andy is so convinced
that she will commit endless fashion crimes that her wardrobe, hair and
beauty colleagues put together a bible for her, detailing what to wear for
different occasions during her fortnight away, advice offered even at the
micro-level of eye shadow (Weisberger 2003:317). Film Andy, by great
contrast, undergoes her initiation into the fashion world and thence
experiences no backsliding. The film’s decision to grant Andy agency and
expertise in choosing outfits and applying makeup has two effects: it makes
her transformation the more total and thus the more magical, as befits the
Cinderella story, and it also underlines the ease with which any woman
could take hold of her life and present herself more fashionably – a
significant part of its intentions.
It seems to me important that the film, while it is happy to recast
and re-inflect various plot points and events from the book, does not see
fit to add a Pygmalion figure to its mix. Nigel inaugurates Andy’s selfrenovation,
guiding her through the wondrous Closet, picking garments
and accessories for her, then handing her over to makeup and coiffure
professionals, but he does not do so from a personal or romantic interest, as
the Pygmalion lover-artist does. Nor for that matter can he really be seen,
like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, elevating a wrongly cast-down heroine
to her rightful place. Andy is not a fashionable or wealthy young woman
forced into a more lowly (costume) position, as Cinderella is; instead, she
has shown herself unwilling to accept the supremacy of surfaces which
Runway insists upon and is thus more lucky than worthy that Nigel takes
pity on her.
The two young men who compete for Andy’s affections in the film’s
(rather superficial) romantic sub-plot have no effect on her wardrobe at
all: neither is qualified for the role of Pygmalion. What is also missing from
this film’s costume narrative, especially in comparison to those of Anni and
Calam, is Andy’s input to her transformation. While Anni dresses like a
lady to secure a better future, and Calam chooses her own version of a
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modulated androgyny once she realises her ‘secret love’, Andy does little
to embrace the transformation beyond asking Nigel to help her fit in, and
then wearing all the fabulous outfits the Closet provides. Her passivity in
this is perhaps an important part of the narrative and is used at the end of
the film when Andy seems, like Calam, to have found a level of glamour
she is comfortable to make her own.
Costume reading
What happens when the costume narrative is employed on a text which not
only openly highlights the importance of the right clothes for a woman, but
is specifically about the importance of fashion? Both The Bride Wore Red and
Calamity Jane include the idea of fashion, in that Anni obviously buys
clothes she believes will make her look like a fashionable lady, and similarly,
the gowns Katie inherits from Adelaid and passes on to Calam are designed
to signal they are fashionable to the audience. But The Devil Wears Prada
is specifically about an institutionalised obsession with not only the latest
clothes, but the priciest, most exclusive, couture clothes, packaged and sold
as images to the readers of Runway. Whether these readers – and the women
in the film’s audience – are being exhorted to go out and buy these
garments, or high-street copycat versions, however, remains to be seen.
I hinted above that I believe the film uses the costume narrative to
remake the book: the wardrobe story is the method of adaptation. But when
the source novel is both so well known and so replete with names of
labels and designers, does this cause a problem for the film-makers? Anne
Thompson for The Hollywood Reporter (2006) indicated that many different
screenwriters tried to shape an arc for the story that would take it from a
series of rather whiny anecdotes to a fully formed narrative, but the shape
of the plot was not the only problem facing the film-makers. As items to be
paraded, bought, sold, borrowed, coveted and endlessly discussed, clothes
themselves were fore-grounded in the book; could Patricia Field then hope
to use costume to underline the characters envisaged by director Frankel,
and herself, when the book had already provided so many sartorial fiats?
Could the schematisation of character-delineating costume work amidst
the noise produced by so many other clothes, especially those produced
by big-name couturiers?
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The creative team behind the film found a solution to combat
Weisberger’s label-mania. In the book, clothes, bags, shoes, jewellery, hats,
belts and other accessories are incessantly mentioned.13
The film however,
not only refuses to use items of clothing mentioned at specific moments in
the novel, but reworks the book’s narrative to place an entirely different
emphasis on Andy’s journey through the film. Looking at the costume
narrative of the film, I want to explore not only the usual aspects of the
wardrobe choices, but also consider how the costume decisions alter both
its heroine’s trajectory and character.
On the DVD commentary for the film Field notes that there were
‘upwards of 60 changes’ for Hathaway’s character in the film: this profusion
of outfits prevents attention being paid to each individual ensemble. I will
thus dwell on pre-transformation outfits, the metamorphosis scene itself,
and key ensembles after it. Overall the trajectory of Andy’s costumes is
from chaos to coherence, from multicolour to monochrome, and, reversing
these less-is-more lessons, from tiny accessories to statement pieces.
The film starts with a montage cross-cutting the morning rituals of
various women against Andy’s dressing for her interview at Runway. The
reverential donning of their clothes and makeup by these model-like
females is contrasted with Andy’s uncaring attitude to clothes: where they
choose with deliberation, she grabs with haste. Her nonchalant adoption
of a dingy pair of panties contrasts with their assiduous selection of petallike,
leopard print or frothy lingerie, their measured breakfasts (exactly
eight almonds placed in a bowl) cut against her carefree purchase of an
onion bagel, munched absentmindedly as she walks to the subway. The
thrust of the sequence is to establish the different places that clothes and
personal appearance have in the lives of these different women; Andy,
about to be interviewed at a publishers, is concerned with her written
output, whereas the others, whose job is to appear glamorous, are themselves
their own output.
Going for her interview at Runway, Andy wears an outfit which might
have passed muster at college but is heavily overwritten as unsuitable for an
interview anywhere, let alone a fashion magazine. Patricia Field, the film’s
costume designer, calls Andy’s pre-transformation look ‘American Simple’
and Hathaway suggests the character is an Everygirl: ‘kind of the girl next
door:… She looks like a girl you know…that you saw on the subway
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…like your babysitter’.14
In contrast to the chic women of the introduction,
Andy is coded as sartorially incoherent, in black trousers, white shirt under
lilac jumper, brown-beige jacket, big brown belted coat, knitted wool scarf
and gloves. The total effect makes Andy out of place in the sleek world of
publishing she is entering.
The following day Andy’s work begins in earnest and she learns her job
is to rush around town collecting hot coffee and anything else for which
Miranda feels a vague need (‘I want 10 or 15 skirts from Calvin Klein’). It
is interesting that although Andy is still in her ‘before’ incarnation here,
Patricia Field dresses her in a designer coat: the wintry Manhattan weather
demands she wears an overcoat, and Andy varies her wardrobe by wearing
a white one. Underneath, her outfit is again uniformly incoherent and this
is commented on overtly by Nigel and, with a glance of distaste, by
Miranda, but the use of the coat is puzzling unless seen as a fashion
forecast of Andy’s future. A bone white coat by Calvin Klein, it is worn by
Andy with a brown and white spotted woolly scarf and, again, woolly
gloves; bundled up into it, with her hair cascading down and around her
coat collar and scarf, Andy still looks a mess. But significantly, she looks
like she has the potential for glamour, and this is possibly why the Calvin
Klein coat is used here. The film’s project throughout is to indicate that
Andy can, with very little commitment and assistance, become inordinately
glamorous. That she has a Calvin Klein coat in her wardrobe is not enough
to confer this glamour on her alone, yet, it indicates the path she will follow
to find what Miranda instantly notices she lacks: ‘You have no style…’
The clothes under the coat also attain significance: they form the
basis for a stern lecture Miranda gives Andy – and the audience – lest
anyone doubt either the seriousness of what Miranda does for a living or the
impact of her decisions on the rest of the dressed world. Andy wears a
thick blue jumper, a blue plaid skirt, thick black tights and black clumpy
slip-ons. Nigel attempts to help her with this particular faux pas, bringing
her a pair of high-heeled sling-backs, but Andy rejects them, assuming
Miranda realises her worth goes beyond the superficial. Miranda instantly
disabuses her of this illusion, however, by casting her gaze at the offending
footwear with a moue of disgust. Interestingly, the camera, in reproducing
Miranda’s dissatisfied look down the length of Andy’s body to her shoes,
inverts the usual upward glance of approval noted as a transformation
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trope. The DVD commentary reveals that this is a signature look of the
cameraman, Florian Balhaus, common enough within his oeuvre to be
dubbed by colleagues ‘a Florian tilt’. This tilt was devised when Balhaus
was working, with Field and Frankel, on Sex and The City, and was
purposefully meant to showcase the programme’s footwear. Having used
this shoe moment to underline Andy’s fashion ignorance, the scene moves
on to crystallise this even further, as Miranda takes Andy to task for her
sneering attitude to fashion.
The speech, not present in the novel, bolsters Miranda’s character,
showing her power is not illusory and thus not totally dictatorial. Miranda
examines two blue belts to use on an outfit she is attempting to construct.
An assistant notes that choosing between them is ‘a tough call…they’re
both so different’, at which Andy sniggers: to her they seem almost
identical. Miranda challenges her, and Andy, trying to get out of the
difficult situation, attempts an escape which summons Miranda’s measured
but devastating tirade:
Andy: …I’m still learning about this stuff…
Miranda: This stuff? Oh, okay, I see…you think this has nothing to do with
you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue
sweater, frinstance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take
yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what
you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue…it’s not turquoise, it’s
The Devil Wears Prada 1: Andy at her interview
not lapis, it’s cerulean, and you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in
2002 Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns and then I
think it was Yves Saint Laurent wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military
jackets – I think we need a jacket here – and then cerulean showed up in
the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down
through the department stores and then trickled down into some tragic
casual corner where you no doubt fished it out of some clearance bin.
However, that ‘blue’ represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and
it’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you
from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was
selected for you by the people in this room – from a pile of stuff.
In the next scene, in Andy’s apartment, she complains about Miranda’s
rant while her boyfriend fries her a cheese sandwich. The business both
characters carry out is significant; he is cooking a highly calorific dinner,
and she, bemoaning the dressing down Miranda gave her, is putting on a
casual outfit for home wear. That this consists of two vests, with sweatpants,
a Northwestern University sweatshirt and a couple of hair-bands proves
that Andy has not got Miranda’s message. She still believes herself
impervious to the dictates of fashion, yet the chaotic outfit reveals her
character, exposing her inability to make the right kind of fashion choices
(this top or this) while also suggesting that she is happy dressing in the
type of messy casuals students wear for comfort. However, there is a sign
at the scene’s end that Andy is starting to pay attention: she won’t eat
the sandwich. While she says she’s not hungry, her follow-up remark shows
the Runway ethos is beginning to permeate: ‘that is why those girls are
so skinny…’
The next significant costume Andy wears is the ‘before’ outfit on the
day of her transformation. In The Devil Wears Prada the failure of an outfit
is usually associated with some other failure by Andy at one of her office
tasks, illustrating she has not yet grasped that dressing to fit in is one of her
principal duties and that everything will improve with fashion compliance.
After another Andy disaster, Miranda coldly notes she had tried to
circumvent just such failures by hiring, not the usual ‘stylish, slender, of
course’ Runway fashionistas but, ‘the smart, fat girl’. Andy leaves the room
stung to tears. For this scene the stylists padded Hathaway to make her
appear large and put her in a pale peachy coloured top to emphasise this.
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Andy wanders off, finds Nigel and complains to him, but he challenges
her superior attitude to fashion; she may believe she is working her
hardest, but behaving as if fashion is beneath her will endear her to no one,
least of all Miranda. In their DVD commentary the creative team assert
it was important that Nigel didn’t just take pity on Andy, but bothered to
stop and upbraid her for her attitude to clothes. Interestingly they describe
this in language which directly evokes and contradicts the role from
Cinderella Nigel seems to play: ‘He’s not a fairy godmother in any way’.
Given that the conversation between Andy and Nigel ends with her
absorption of his criticism, and the realisation that she can prove her
devotion to Runway by conforming to its aesthetic standards, this remark
seems disingenuous. The scene ends with Andy beseechingly saying ‘Nigel?
Nigel!’ and his firm ‘No’. In keeping with the traditional comic trope,
however, where a definite negative is instantly overthrown, the following
scene opens with Nigel leading the way into the magic Closet where all
the sample clothes sent to the magazine are stored. Though he protests
they are bound to find nothing big enough for her (an American 6 and
thus the equivalent of a UK 10) Nigel does amass an armful of goodies for
Andy, significantly picking items he names by their designer: ‘We’re doing
this Dolce for you, and shoes – Jimmy Choo’s, Manolo Blahnik’s…Nancy
Gonzalez, mmm love that, and this is a Rodriguez, this we love…okay now
Chanel, you’re in desperate need of Chanel…’
Nigel then ushers her off to the beauty department. Andy returns to
her office after her transformation and is now given her big moment;
importantly the major change besides the removal of the padding and her
new groomed hair, cut with a fringe instead of just lying bushily on her
shoulders, is that she wears Chanel top to toe: a blazer, thigh-high leather
boots, a skimpy top with sequins, and gold chains. Although the various
fabrics used in the outfit – the shiny fetishistic leather balanced by the
nubby material of micro mini skirt and blazer – are significantly eyecatching,
it is the designer rather than the design that is really important at
this point. Just to make sure the audience get that she is now dressed in
designer couture, Emily falteringly asks ‘How did…are you wearing the
Ch…?’ Andy smoothly anticipates her question and finishes it for her:
‘The Chanel boots? Yes, I am’. In fact, this wardrobe transformation seems
to have had an immediate effect on Andy’s efficiency as, entering the office
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in her new outfit she steps smartly to the ringing telephone and, for the
first time in the film, answers it in the approved Runway fashion without
seeming ill at ease. Andy, dressed thus, is for the first time unflappable.
If Andy astonishes Emily here with her sartorial metamorphosis, the
next scene shows her boyfriend is no less amazed. He sees her waiting for
him outside the restaurant where he works; as he looks in astonishment, a
music track begins which then acts as a bridge into the next scene, a
montage showing Andy going to work in successive fabulous outfits. The
song is ‘Vogue’ by Madonna. While it has been noted previously that
montages such as this, designed to show off the transformation outfits,
generally use a catchy tune, here the lyrics of the song seem strangely at odds
with the sentiment of the scene. Madonna’s song contains the line ‘Beauty’s
where you find it’, and a mantra more oppositional to the Runway credo
could hardly be imagined. I think the reason this song is used here, other
than because it is bouncy and acts to move along the scene of Andy turning
up at work in increasingly outré outfits, is as a sly reference to the film’s
source novel. If, as was widely hinted at the time, Lauren Weisberger’s time
at Vogue magazine inspired her to write the novel as a form of revenge
against her own Miranda Priestly-type boss, Anna Wintour, then the film
can be seen using this track as an oblique homage to that vengeance notion,
confirming Runway, Andy’s destination throughout the montage, as the
film version of Vogue.
During the track, Andy’s progress to work is filmed as if it were a single
journey, repeating recognisable points of the trip she made during the
opening credits; here the fact that these are actually iterative journeys is
made plain by the different outfits she wears, changing whenever a
vehicle passes or Andy goes down into or emerges from the subway: it is an
economical device which shows that she is reaping the sartorial benefit
of the Runway closet, even as the outfits she dons become more extreme
fashionably: shorter, tighter and of richer fabrics.
The film continues to showcase Andy wearing a variety of couture;
this is sometimes made evident by naming the designer and sometimes by
the presence of the fashion house’s well-known logo visible in the ensemble
(such as the interlocking c’s which indicate Chanel). The next ‘big’
wardrobe moment, however, is, by contrast, label-less. Miranda decides she
needs not just Emily but also Andy with her at a lavish fashion benefit.
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The scene is significant in several ways. It marks a further stage of Andy’s
enslavement to her job – she complies with Miranda’s wishes and goes to
the soirée despite it being Nate’s birthday. As an evening formal event it
puts Andy into full evening dress and thus speaks to the movie’s
Cinderella motif, especially when she encounters Christian on the stairs
as she is departing – she doesn’t lose her shoe, but the film does have her
flee from him to meet a time-deadline. It also marks a point when her
own regime of not eating, alluded to occasionally, begins to pay off:
Andy, looking for Nigel and an evening gown in the closet finds he has
something gorgeous for her:
Andy: I love that! Will it fit me?
Nigel: Oh yeah…a little Crisco and some fishing wire and we’re in business.
This exchange reveals that the pair have become close enough for
teasing; when Andy turns up at the benefit, however, Nigel halts his
conversation to give her a definite look of approval at the fit. It seems
significant that although Andy is wearing a designer (Galliano) at this
point, the name of the couturier is not the focus of the scene – her
princess moment is enshrined in the flattering shape of the dress, the soft
delicate lacy over-sleeves that seem to caress her upper arms, and without
the interruption of commerce and consumerism. Christian remarks,
‘You’re a vision’, and the aim of the scene is to enforce this, not to pay its
respects to a particular designer at this point. Of course Andy is wearing
couture; the point is that she looks appropriately fabulous – and thin –
in it.
When Miranda takes Andy and not Emily to Paris, she negotiates the
hurdles of the job, pleasing Miranda, while also putting together her own
outfits and finding time to romance Christian. As usual, when her wardrobe
achievements are mentioned, it is Nigel to whom Andy plays. When he
tells Andy about his new venture outside Runway, Andy toasts him with
champagne and another one of their bantering exchanges follows:
Andy: Congratulations, Nigel: you deserve it.
Nigel: You bet your size six ass I –
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Andy: – Four!
Nigel: Really?…Let me see that!
Andy’s weight loss has been a subtle, background, story; she has not
been seen carrying out a dieting regime, but the combination of her
constant frenzied activity, plus the absorbed lesson that Runway women
must be thin, has obviously impacted on her and is the more insidious for
being tacit.
Two final costumes of significance remain in the film. The contrast
between the two could not, at first, seem greater: Andy goes from couture
gown to leather jacket and jeans. But this seeming repudiation of the
fashion world is more complex than it first appears.
Andy rushes to warn Miranda of the plot against her but is snubbed
by her boss. Off screen she then changes for the next round of activities,
dressing in a Louis Vuitton semi-formal outfit – back-accented dark green
dress, short-sleeved black jacket, heels, diamonds, tiny gold bag – for the
Runway lunch where Nigel’s new job is to be announced. This is probably
the most dressed up, the most couture, we have seen Andy, appropriately
The Devil Wears Prada 2: Are those the Chanel boots?
enough because this is when her temptation is at its height. After giving
Jacqueline Follet the job Nigel had wanted in order to safeguard her own,
Miranda travels with her assistant to the next event. If Miranda is the
Devil of the book and film’s title, this is the occasion for her tempting the
innocent Andy; as they ride through the glittering City of Light, Miranda
seems to offer her protégée the world. And this is the moment that Andy,
beautifully coiffed, made-up and dressed up as she is, wakes up. She realises
that dictating others’ outfits and lives is not why she got into publishing: she
wanted to write. Walking away from the temptation offered here echoes
her earlier rejection, at the Runway benefit, of Christian, who arrives as she
departs. Although he dangles as bait before her the possibility of meeting his
editor Andy resists that enticement; here too, practically offered a share
of her world by Miranda Priestly, she simply walks away.
The final scene of the film shows Andy back in New York City and in
what, compared to the costumes since her transformation, seem to be
‘normal’ clothes. She is being interviewed again, as in the film’s opening
scene, but now for the type of job she always wanted, on a reputable New
York newspaper. As she walks through the Manhattan streets we are given
a chance to see her outfit in detail: she wears a leather jacket, calf-length
high-heeled boots over jeans, a black polo neck jumper and a pendant.
Her hair is glossy and sleek, and she looks slender, chic and put together.
Rejecting Runway has evidently not meant rejecting the lessons she has
learnt about being judged at face value. Given that her tasks as Miranda’s
assistant mostly involved pouring Pellegrino, buying coffee and sourcing
unsourceable objects, what Andy has told the editor about her time at
Runway – ‘learnt a lot’ – seems at odds with her actual day-to-day
experience. What she has actually learnt is that exteriors count and an
intelligent woman is foolish to ignore them.
Considering the ways in which the traditional tropes of the
transformation scene play out in this particular film, I will start here by
looking not at the thematic, but at the visual tropes. All four of the
common aesthetic elements used to mark the metamorphosis scene are
present in The Devil Wears Prada, but it makes often innovative use of
these. For example, it employs the staircase motif, but not at the precise
moment of transformation. Both of the major important temptations of
Andy are staged on or at the foot of staircases. In the first instance, Andy
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is running away from the Runway party when she meets Christian going in;
stopping on the stairs, both turn so they are facing away from where they
are going, as they flirt around the topic of their mutual attraction.
Christian offers what he hopes will be the clincher: if Andy won’t stay and
have a drink with him, will she talk to his boss, who is interested in her
writing? Christian tries to sidestep the personal frisson between himself and
Andy, luring her through her ambitions, but she resists. It is important to
recognise that it is not Christian himself who is the temptation to Andy
– if he were, we would judge her a failure when she later sleeps with him.
The temptation the film portrays is that of fast-tracking her way to being
a writer by cultivating contacts, and it is important for Andy’s integrity
that she refuses this.
The second moment of important staircase placement has Andy refuse
to step onto the stairs at all. In Paris, after Miranda has seemingly offered
her the world, Andy alights from the limousine and stares up at her boss
engulfed by photographers and journalists. She again chooses not to take
The Devil Wears Prada 3: Height of temptation
the bait, and here, as Miranda visibly rises in front of her, going up the
stairs, Andy rejects the notion of succeeding, getting on and getting up, the
entire premise of Miranda’s offer.
While some transformation moments choose to stage their ‘big reveals’
on a staircase, having the newly transfigured woman emerge in her new
form, then slowly descend like a goddess coming down to earth to her
adoring worshippers, The Devil Wears Prada chooses astutely to split these
moments and to use the stairs in a divergent symbolic register. Perhaps
because there are literally so many ‘catwalk’ moments staged on runways,
the film wanted to avoid employing that metaphor here: Andy rejects the
runway at the moment she rejects Runway.
Instead, Andy’s personal apotheosis, when she appears in her new
incarnation to the amazement of her on-screen audience, occurs in a far
more fitting place: the office. Her failure at simple office tasks – answering
the telephone, writing memos – has already been shown; now when she
glides into the space, in slow-motion, in thigh highs, and in control, her
first act is to take the perfect phone call. Andy’s transformation may only
consist of a few designer items and a sleeker haircut, but the difference in
terms of her self-confidence is palpable, and aptly rendered by her languid
strut, showcased in slow-mo as she tosses her new chic hair over one
shoulder to a shimmering, magical-sounding riff on the soundtrack.
The film also uses the visual trope of the camera pan up the body
and interestingly modulates its usual employment so that it happens not
only when Andy’s boyfriend appraises her but also when Miranda does.
Nate’s reaction is explored below in considering the film’s use of the
misrecognition moment; Miranda’s comes during the montage of costume
changes which accompanies ‘Vogue’ on the soundtrack. With the last outfit
change, when Andy is wearing a velvet coat, mini dress and high boots, she
readies Miranda’s desk and then exits as Miranda enters the room. The
camera pans up her body in the approved manner for noting a costume
improvement: that this is Miranda’s point of view, rather than a man’s,
underlines the fact that it is a job Andy is changing for, rather than the
usual aim of gaining a partner. This pan up her body – which is underlined
by Miranda turning her head to watch Andy leave the room – echoes and
answers the disapproving pan down her figure, the ‘Florian tilt’, which
Miranda gave earlier. There it was used not just to showcase the shoes, as
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the commentary suggests, but to signal Miranda’s awareness of Andy failing
to fit in. The look up her body now confirms Andy has got it right. Andy’s
reactions to the two appreciative pans reveal her real interest and ambitions:
while she is pleased at Nate’s response to her change, her face seems to
be glowing with pride and excitement when she walks from Miranda’s
room knowing her boss has given her the ‘once-over’ of appreciation.
Besides these visual tropes, The Devil Wears Prada also employs many
of the thematic elements of the film-based transformation, and its omissions
are easy to fathom. For example, the main trope it excludes from its schema
is the visible transformation. This is calculatedly not shown, as the point of
the film is to erase the work needed to turn Andy ‘from geek to chic’.15
In
order to underline its message, the wardrobe alteration has to occur off
screen, and thus the film makes use of the invisible transformation. When
Andy reappears after her transformation, to the chagrin of Emily and the
The Devil Wears Prada 4: Ameliorated glamour
frank admiration of Serena, the work necessary to render her a couture
version of herself has been accomplished off screen, in the edit between
leaving the Closet and arriving in the office. In using this trope the film
almost employs the shopping motif also, although there is one significant
difference between the scene in which Andy gathers her armfuls of
designer goodies and that in, say, Gold Diggers of 1937: there is no money
involved. This is shopping at its most magical and fantasy-fulfilling, since
the accumulation of consumables costs nothing.
There is also obvious employment of the misrecognition moment.
After Andy’s transformation, the scene cuts to the exterior of the restaurant
where Nate works. He is coming out; Andy is leaning against a car waiting
for him. As he walks by, he checks her out as he would any attractive
female, and carries on walking. Then he comes to a halt, slowly looks back
at her, and the camera gives us the slow pan-up of approval as he takes in
her changed appearance. When Andy asks, ‘So, what do you think?’, his
answer perfectly enshrines the totality of the metamorphosis: ‘I think we
better get out of here before my girlfriend sees me with you!’ Andy is so
different, she is not just improved, but seems a totally different person.
However, the film attempts to prove that Nate is wrong in this assumption;
and this may be the reason that the couple does not end the film together.
It is crucial to the way the film shapes Andy’s trajectory and alters its source
novel that the young woman has not become a different person but – again
employing the ‘true self’ motif so frequently found – is at last letting her
exterior reflect her authentic interior.
This emphasis on the ‘true self’ trope is the way the film attempts to
put across its message, not just to Andy, but to the audience also. In order
for this message to be effective, the film needs to couple the invisible
transformation with the idea of one’s authentic identity being released –
rather than changed – by the proper outfitting. To this end, it sets out to
make Andy’s metamorphosis seem as natural as possible. This is not done in
the same way as Calam’s alteration, through an inevitable maturation and
gradual relinquishing of immature tomboy ways. Instead, this is achieved by
altering the heroine of the book through her wardrobe, the film’s method
of adapting its source text. It is through her attitude to her appearance
that The Devil Wears Prada subjects the character of Andrea Sachs to a
comprehensive shift. Book Andy begins her slavery at Runway indifferent
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about fashion, and leaves the same way – clueless and unskilled. Film Andy
starts unkempt and uncaring, but not without the potential for sartorial
salvation. Unlike her novel counterpart, she learns how to dress, put
together a chic ensemble, apply mascara; and this latter moment is dwelt
on as a telling close-up cues a flashback: in her hotel room in Paris, Andy
contemplates the distance she has travelled between her interview day
and the present moment amidst the glamour of Paris Fashion Week.
Unlike both The Bride Wore Red and Calamity Jane, where the costume
narratives acted at times to undermine and subvert the dominant narrative
trajectories, The Devil Wears Prada operates its dominant and costume
narratives in tandem. This film uses its costume plot not as an oppositional
discourse to the dominant narrative of the film, but as an oppositional
discourse to the source novel. The schematised wardrobe changes are not
merely indicative of the central character’s trajectory – they are its
materialisation. The costume discourse establishes itself as such an integral
part of the narrative that it becomes the primary method of adapting the
novel and its heroine to the screen, achieving a volte-face on the book’s
final refutation of fashion. While Print Andy ultimately rejects fashion,
Runway, and Miranda Priestly, Screen Andy introjects the lessons she has
learnt during her tenure at the magazine. After Miranda, Book Andy reverts
comfortably to weight gain and wearing the same pair of (non-designer)
jeans every day for a week; Film Andy, while in jeans, looks as slim, chic,
groomed and accessorised as at the height of her Runway time.
By thus reversing the conclusion of the novel, the film version of The
Devil Wears Prada valorises not fashion per se – as Andy’s more extreme
outfits have indicated, this is not really suitable for ‘real life’ – but the
duty of attractive self-presentation. In doing so the film renders its central
character a more mature young woman than the whiney self-justifier who
inhabits the book, slyly changing the tenor of the text from roman à clef as
a mode of revenge, to a bildungsroman as an act of advertising. And what is
being advertised is the same version of the American dream Brenda Weber
found infusing Extreme Makeover: the idea that every woman should make
the best of herself; that this best involves a glamorised appearance; and
that this appearance supports national consumerism.
If Andy, a smart but averagely (un)stylish recent graduate can learn
enough about clothes to pass muster in the cut-throat world of high
SECTION THREE: CASE STUDIES 191
fashion then, the film suggests, with a little help and a little luck – and a
little diet – so could we all. Andy’s easy absorption of the Runway ethos,
which takes place in a single edit and suffers no backsliding, promises the
audience that any woman who takes hold of her life, pays attention and
swears off fried cheese sandwiches can become more glamorous. The work
of Nigel and the Runway beauty professionals who cut Andy’s hair and give
her a sophisticated makeup, must then be invisible to play to the twin and
paradoxically linked fantasies such films foster: that such changes are
magical (hence Andy’s show-stopping entrance, the shimmering music on
the soundtrack, the slow-motion strutting and hair tossing) and, because
they involve no evident work, easy.
Furthermore, while Andy has been toiled over in the makeup and hair
departments, the overall effect is not of difference (the makeover) but
improvement (the make-better). This is an essential factor in the film’s
project. For the Andy of the final scene to have learnt a permanent lesson,
the glamour and attractiveness have to be inherent within clueless Andy.
The transformation of the heroine that Nigel assists, then, does not
represent change so much as evolution. I think this is the ultimate reason
the film neglects to show the transformation process itself – because by not
revealing the workings of the transformation it will seem more organic.
The film’s project is to reveal that Andy was always a high-fashion princess
inside; not showing the process required to render her thus outwardly
makes this seem all the more plausible.
It is interesting to ponder whether The Devil Wears Prada presents
Andy’s transformation as a false one, and thus employs this common motif
of the metamorphosis film also. While it does show her adapting to, and
indeed relishing, the haute couture she is allowed to borrow from the
Closet, the film eventually hints that this is not the real Andy, again
utilising the ‘true self’ trope as a touchstone to guide viewer understanding
of the choices she makes. Andy’s transformation is then a false one
inasmuch as she does not maintain her allegiance to designers such as Dolce
and Gabbana, Azrouel and Galliano once she has left Runway, rejecting
these labels’ extreme couture which she wears during her Paris trip. Instead,
the film posits there are levels of transformation for Andy, beginning with
her catwalk moment when she strides in slow-motion and grace into her
office in Chanel.
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This scene, as has been noted above, is carefully crafted to make
her alteration seem natural and easy, a glamorising rather than a total
revolution. As noted, Emily name-checks the designer so that the audience
is in no doubt that Andy, who Nigel proclaimed was ‘in desperate need of
Chanel’ has found some, and is wearing it to great effect. After this scene
the outfits she wears become more and more haute and heavily accented
as designer, either by literally revealing the label or by their extremity as
office wear – the Calvin Klein dress, the mini skirt with velvet coat. This
commitment to extreme fashion reaches its zenith, appropriately, as
Andy reaches the height of trying to be the perfect assistant, in Paris with
Miranda. Wearing the highest heels, the tightest skirts and the most
plunging necklines, Andy here almost succumbs to the seduction of
Runway, and Miranda.
Andy has to learn, in that other favourite transformation trope, to
ameliorate the extremity of her outfits, to dial down the haute of her
couture to something approaching a more everyday level. In a review of
The Devil Wears Prada in Cineaste, Martha Nochimson concludes that
instead of opting, as the heroines of 1980s career women movies do, for
the ‘mommy track’ at the end of the movie, Andy chooses ‘the dowdy
track’ (Nochimson 2006: 50). I do not think the film shows Andy as
dowdy, however; at the film’s conclusion she seems not rejecting glamour,
so much as excess, toning her look down to a level more appropriate to
her current circumstances. She does not revert to the big-haired, multicoloured
slouch of the earliest scenes; as she strides confidently off through
Manhattan in her cigarette jeans and stiletto-heeled boots, her outfit may
be casual but is also stylish. And I think that the labels she promotes in this
final outfit are chosen intentionally as part of the film’s ultimate message
to the viewer.
Kirk Honeycutt’s review of the film in The Hollywood Reporter criticises
the movie for an unresolved ambivalence towards the world of high fashion:
It eventually becomes clear that there is method to Miranda’s madness:
Her incessant demands are tests to purge staff members who are not up to
her own ruthless quest for perfection. Indeed the virtuous moral at the
movie’s end – that this is no way to live a good life – feels hallow [sic]
because the film displays an unmistakable ambivalence toward Runway.
With its grudging admiration for fashion-fabulous costumes and for
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this glamorous lifestyle, the film idolises that which it would skewer.
(Honeycutt: 2006)
While I take Honeycutt’s point, I think the film is intending to make
a distinction between the ‘fashion-fabulous’ costumes it endorses, and those
it considers too outré to be useful. If Andy is our ‘Everygirl’, then the outfit
in which she ends the film is the important one. She has not, like her
book counterpart, reverted to wearing the same pair of jeans every day for
weeks,16
nor has she seemingly gained back any of the weight the Runway
regime skimmed off her. Albeit in more casual mode, she is still wearing
designer labels: her brown leather jacket is by Vince,17
her black turtleneck
sweater is a DKNY design and her chocolate suede stiletto boots are Calvin
Klein. Significantly, all these designers are American. If, as Weber suggests,
it is an American woman’s patriotic duty to look her best, and to commit
financial resources to doing so, then it is surely also her duty to support
American designers when she is out shopping?
The over-the-top designs and outfits that Andy models in the office
and then in Paris are fabulous but they are also free: she could not hope to
afford them on a salary either from Runway or from her new writing job.
American designers’ couture may be too pricey also but their diffusion and
high-street lines are affordable and patriotic buys, however. The Devil Wears
Prada thus takes Andy from her college-era wardrobe of thrift store
‘American simple’ up to the dizzy and rarefied heights of European haute
couture and then slightly down again to more sensible levels of attainable
chic from American labels. Three films have been looked at in detail in
these case studies. The Bride Wore Red, Calamity Jane and The Devil Wears
Prada were chosen because each seems to exemplify how Hollywood films
have consistently been interested in exploring and exploiting the
connections between costume and transformation. They each also offer
opportunities to see both the frequency – almost, it seems, the inevitability
– of presenting the internal metamorphosis within the narrow range of
traditional externalised tropes, and the specific ways in which the
transformation theme resonated with the particular social and historical
contexts of the films’ producing times.
For all three films, the intricate involvement of the star persona and
the transformation trope proved to be an unexpected but inescapable
finding. While Day has associations of maturation and chronologically
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expected changes within her resonances, both Crawford and Hathaway,
although ostensibly such different types and from such different historical
periods, both proved to have ‘the makeover’ as a major recurrent element
in their films and screen personae, a point underlined by the frequency
with which press compared both of them to Cinderella.
The idea of a separate ‘costume narrative’ existing in a mainstream
film and serving sometimes to underline, and sometimes undermine,
characterisation or narrative points advanced by the dominant story
trajectory was borne out by all the studied films, with all three proving
to be fascinatingly ambivalent texts. The Bride Wore Red attempted
to condemn its heroine Anni for using her sexuality to get ahead, to
get a man and to get wealth, but firstly in casting energetic Crawford
and then in dressing her in Adrian’s ravishing red beaded gown, the
film sent very mixed messages about the behaviour for women it would
deem more appropriate. The film also notably failed to punish Anni for
her transgressions: while it removed her shot at riches, it gave her the
love of her life, whom she would never have met if not masquerading
as a fine lady – which the film attempts to censure. Above all, the use of
the red gown as an index of undesirable femininity was a bizarre and
doomed concept given its modern shape, richness and suitability for
Crawford’s form.
In Calamity Jane the costume narrative is again at odds with the
dominant trajectory since this wants to see her androgyny and agency
safely confined in a bustled frock, but this goal is circumvented by the fact
that the emotional highlight comes not when the heroine has been trussed
up in her wedding dress, but in the scene before, while Calam, still dressed
in trousers, proclaims her ‘Secret Love’.
The two films thus work to destabilise the dominant narrative
trajectory, and use their costume schema as a way of letting ambivalent
messages and unresolved issues into the text. By contrast, The Devil Wears
Prada runs its costume and dominant narratives in concert, using costume’s
potential for fostering an oppositional discourse to counteract the thrust
not of the film’s story, but that of the original source novel. Thus working
in tandem, the costume plot and the main story seek to subvert the book’s
total rejection of fashion, turning it instead into a dismissal of European
haute couture excess and a valorisation of American designers.
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In addition, all three costume narratives suggest that Gaines’ tenet,
that the costume plot ‘cannot anticipate narrative developments’ is often
invalid. These three films consistently allow costume to forecast the
narrative ahead, and, in particular, the sartorial transformation which their
heroine will undertake. The opening scene of The Devil Wears Prada,
cutting ‘American simple’ Andy against the ‘fashion-fabulous’ women
neatly highlights the distance between the Runway women and the
aspiring writer as well as indicating that this is a journey she will make
during the course of the film. Calam’s recourse to clean white clothing,
whenever hurt by Bill’s personal remarks about her androgyny, becomes
a decisive element in her own choice of clothing after rejecting the false
transformation urged on her by Katie; the small amounts of white shirt
shown under her dirty deerskins increase in stages to culminate in her
wedding dress; thus again her selection of that pristine garment, worn next
to her skin, almost as protection against Bill’s slights, acts as a forecast of
outfits and attitudes to come. Finally, Anni’s whole story is, in effect,
predicted to the audience at the very start of the film, when her modelled
figure appears, dominant and vital, in peasant gear, towering over the
mountains and little towns on the music box. Although this is not the
first outfit we see the human Anni wearing, the impact of the model on the
box is sufficient to suggest to the audience this is an outfit we will be seeing
again and which will have great narrative significance. Not only is this,
then, the dress Anni is wearing when she secures a marriage proposal from
Rudi, it is also what she wears, disgraced and ostracised at the end of the
film, when Giulio claims her.
In the theory section of this work, we saw how Jane Gaines’ ideas that
design and fabric could carry their own symbolism was borne out; in the
three case studies too, the particular qualities of a choice of cloth or
silhouette have proved to be significant. In Anni’s case, the Bride who
attempts to Wear Red on the evening of her marriage dons a far more
demure, bridal-type gown on her first evening at the hotel; this outfit acts
as a type of displacement of the innocent attire she should put on as a bride,
and it attracts both Rudi and Giulio’s attention. The softness, sheerness
and yielding fragility of the gown imply similar qualities belong to Anni
herself – quite erroneously. A similar use of a white gown can be seen in
Calamity Jane, but there the design symbolism is used to mark Calam off
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from the other fashionable Deadwood ladies, as her dress is much more
columnar, and less festooned with the apron-like swag at the front than
the others, as well as, perhaps, to reinforce the idea that her phallic and
active body has not been totally tamed by the act of putting on a dress.
Both fabric and design can be seen, finally, in The Devil Wears Prada, to
be offering hints about the wearer; in Andy’s final outfit, for instance, her
leather jacket, albeit a designer one, has a few of the overtones of ‘street’
and ‘rebel’ which traditionally accompany such a garment (there would be
more if the jacket had been black – that would have more clearly spelled
‘rock n roll’). Alongside the armour-like leather, which Andy has perhaps
donned as a mechanism to defend herself in her interview, she also wears
a black polo neck very much in keeping with the idea of an intellectual;
this outfit spells ‘writer’ as much as other costumes worn by Andy after
her transformation signified ‘fashion lackey’.
What I hope the case studies have shown is how films telling the
story of inner and outer transformation in Hollywood have come to rely
on a series of motifs and elements which they use and re-use, sometimes
with knowing glee. These visual and thematic tropes have both maintained
a consistency across the wide historical period examined, and found new
ways to engage with the specific times and societal impulses prompting the
films themselves. Close attention paid to these scenes of metamorphosis
can illuminate ambivalences and uncertainties about how successfully
clothes can – and should – render our inner ‘true selves’ outwardly. Without
concentration on the costume narratives in our case studies, for example,
we might share the dissatisfaction with which successive generations of
critics have viewed The Bride Wore Red and felt that the conclusion of
Calamity Jane definitively closes down the heroine’s active identity. The
Devil Wears Prada similarly shows that costume can be the method by
which an adaptation of a well-known source novel can become not so much
a rendering in another medium as a total subversion of its intentions.
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