I chose to watch the movie The Devil Wears Prada, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway. Streep plays the editor in chief of a major fashion magazine – and as such a significant player in the world of fashion, making and breaking the careers of those around her. Hathaway plays a young assistant who joins the magazine and quickly learns how singly devoted one must be to fashion in order to succeed in the industry. I learned how separate the world of fashion and design is from the rest of reality – and how deeply immersed in it one has to be to gain influence. This immersion not only dominates all of one’s time but also changes the way one treats those around them. Streep’s character is ruthless throughout the movie, making opulent demand after demand, seemingly to try to find out the breaking point of her assistants. At one point in the movie, Streep’s character is flanked by Hathaway’s character and her other assistant at a function; the job of the assistants is to remind Streep’s character of the identity of the important people coming up to greet her. An ambassador is making his way up; the other assistant (who was supposed to go to Paris with Streep’s character for a major show) briefly forgets who he is. Hathaway tells Streep’s character who it is; as punishment to the other assistant, Streep’s character decides to take Hathaway’s character to Paris instead – and makes Hathaway’s character tell her that she is off the trip.
All the while, the relationship that Hathaway’s character has with her boyfriend is deteriorating the whole way through. They never get to see each other; Hathaway’s character is working 60 to 80 hours a week – even bringing assignments home to complete, working late into the night while he goes to bed. Things get to the point where the two are so unhappy that they break up, not because of flaws on either part, but because they simply fall out of love from a lack of communication. Near the end of the movie, they get together for a cup of coffee; he reveals to her that he has gotten a job in Boston (the movie is set in New York City). Hathaway’s character has since resigned her position, deciding that she does not want the life that Streep’s character has had: a lifetime without romantic attachment, every possible moment spent with people who are so focused on externals that they miss out on everything that is important.
This movie is true to life, in my opinion. The world of fashion is focused on the way that people look, to the extent that the women and men who are chosen to be the models for our society, in the photographs that fill fashion and lifestyle magazines, have physiques that are simply unnatural, whether it is through a decision not to eat or to use drugs (or both) to maintain an emaciated level of weight. The ruthless manner with which people treat each other in this world is such that it changes the people who dwell there, making them ruthless as well – and lonely. Hathaway’s character does not want this sort of life for herself, and so she finds it relatively easy to leave the fashion world behind.
