Rewriting The Devil Wears Prada
Remember that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Andy (Anne Hathaway) sniggers as Miranda (Meryl Streep) and her colleagues argue over which of two very similar belts match an outfit and Andy gets served? It always pisses me off. It goes like this:
Miranda Priestly: Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No. Nothing. It’s just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know, I’m still learning about all this stuff and, uh…
Miranda Priestly: This …’stuff’? 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, for instance, 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 not lapis. It’s actually 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… And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on 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 that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.
This is what I would have said to that if I was Anne Hathaway:
Andy Sachs: You know what, Ms Priestly? With all due respect, fuck you. You think Oscar de la Renta has the idea for cerulean just fall into his head by some divine power and it trickles down from there? What about all the cool hunters paid to hang out at street level and report back to their superiors (like de la Renta) on what new trends are emerging from the ground up? Or the up-and-coming designers with fresh ideas that de la Renta is watching like a hawk and ripping off of? Few things in this world are simply top down, Ms Priestly. It’s a reciprocal relationship and the little guy’s place in deciding the trends shouldn’t be forgotten just because he’s not the one profiting from it like you and your whole damn class of douchey fashion goons. Your trickle down fashion theory is as bullshit as trickle down economics and we all know that is bullshit, Ms Priestly, it’s such bullshit.
And another thing: even if it is as simple as Oscar de le Renta waking up one day and hereby declaring cerulean is The Shit this Fall and every designer from Oscar down follows his lead and makes everything cerulean, so what? So fucking what? Did we really need someone telling us that? Why should that garner respect? It’s like Eliza Doolittle sings to Rex Harrison, everything in this world would go along perfectly bloody fine without you. We don’t need a fashion hierarchy telling us what to wear. And evidence of your impact on my own wardrobe and the wardrobe of anyone else that walks into this office, doesn’t justify anything. It just shows that you’ve got a lot of power, and you’re using it to decide colours and hemlines. I’ll hold my applause till you use that awesome amount of power to do something valuable like steer people away from fur, find alternatives to sweatshop labor and support environmentally friendly fabrics. Until then you can fuck the horse you rode in on. I quit. I’m going to find something more meaningful to do with myself and not let this job ruin my relationship with Adrian Grenier. He’s a good man, Ms Priestly, and he deserves better than the woman I am slowly becoming here and the person by extension we are all becoming by being complicit in Corporate America. Fuck you Meryl, I was right all along. Damn you and your fashion elite’s delusional ideas of their own self-importance straight to damn hell.
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