The Devil Wears Prada is Awful and Factually Inaccurate

Never saw The Devil Wears Prada but I’d lie to you if I did. Meryl Streep is supposed to be great in it. I’ve never seen a movie she’s been in but the middleaged women I play bridge with on the third Sunday of every month tell me she’s fantastic. I did see The Devil in Miss Jones. Not the Damiano original, only the six sequels it spawned. I also saw The Devil’s Advocate with Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino. In it, Pacino plays a sadistic lawyer who is actually the Devil and wants to corrupt young Reeves for some strange reason. So I can only assume that The Devil Wears Prada is of a similar theme. Meryl Streep plays some sort of ‘Beelzebub’ or ‘Mephistopheles’ and is the editor at a fashion magazine who takes great pleasure in stealing the souls of her employees and readers. Presumably while wearing Prada. I’m not even really sure where you’d buy Prada, what it looks like, or what it costs. Does it even exist? Basically all I know about Prada is how to spell it. That and Meryl Streep, the satanic magazine editor, likes to wear it while hypnotizing her female employees and making them engage in bizarre pagan sex rituals.

I do know there is a disappointing lack of Devils and Prada in the office. Okay, maybe there are a few lesser devils. Two-legged centaurs like Tewt from The Mighty Hercules cartoons. But there are no capital ‘d’ devils and there is no Prada on our dainty cloven hooves. Does anyone care? Is anyone really impressed by uber brands anymore? Those were semi-rhetorical questions so don’t answer back to the magazine—it’ll look really weird to the person sitting beside you. Over the past five years we’ve all learned a little more about the conditions under which fashion is produced and the consequences of being a “brand slave.” Undeniably, people are smarter about this sort of stuff and the average high school student will be able to lecture you about branding.

Despite this increased collective knowledge, anyone who throws paint on your clothes also spends time every morning deciding what they’re going to wear. We all have an image of ourselves that we want to project. Some want to look like a model. Some want to simply blend in. Some want to look like they don’t give a fuck what they look like. Ironically, the latter probably takes the most time out of the three to pull off. It’s inescapable unless you want to be like Albert Einstein and wear the same thing everyday.

But Einstein too cared about fashion. He said, “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” You should listen to this guy because he came up with the theory that made all three of the Back to the Future movies possible. If you were to ask Einstein about this statement today he would say nothing because he’s dead. But if he were alive, Einstein would agree that meat and wrapper should go hand in hand, one complimenting the other. (Statements always sound more credible when you include an “Einstein would agree.”) So by all means fix up and look sharp, but clothes shouldn’t make the man. Rather, they should enhance him. Enhance him till he is a remorseless and unstoppable party killing machine. Take the peacock. Did you know that,despite their beautiful plumage, the peacock has a naturally horrible disposition and is the loneliest creature in the entire animal kingdom? It isn’t, but think how blown away you’d be right now if it were.