What The Devil Wears Prada and Your iPhone Have in Common: Nothing Has Changed in Twenty Years

This post grew out of a conversation with Daniel Thron on the CG Garage Podcast. You can listen to the full episode here.

The Devil Wears Prada came out in 2006. Its sequel arrived on May 1st, 2026. Twenty years separating two films in the same franchise, featuring largely the same cast, set in the same world.

Here is the strange thing: you can barely tell.

Working Girl (1988) - The Devil Wears Prada (2006) - The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

Watch the original and try to place it in time. The cinematography holds up. The fashion is slightly dated but nothing that would raise an alarm. The cars outside look like they drove off a lot last year. The Macs on the assistants' desks look like last year's model, just slightly thinner. The music doesn't feel like a time capsule. The only genuine giveaway is the phones: flip phones, weird ringtones, the particular texture of an era before smartphones swallowed everything.

Strip those out and the film could have been made in 2021.

Now run the same test on the gap that preceded it. The distance between 1986 and 2006 is the same twenty years. But place a film from each era side by side and the difference is unmistakable. Fashion, lighting, film stock, slang, narrative structure, the physical shape of technology in people's hands: everything changed. You could not confuse Working Girl with The Devil Wears Prada. The cultural distance is too vast.

That's the observation worth sitting with. From 1986 to 2006, twenty years produced an enormous transformation in how culture looked, sounded, and moved. From 2006 to 2026, twenty years produced almost nothing of the kind. Something stalled. And it wasn't just in cinema.

The Template Problem

The Devil Wears Prada is a genuinely good film. It's emotionally precise, well-acted, and subtly more complex than its premise suggests. But its cultural legacy is a complicated one, because it also became a template at exactly the moment the industry was looking for templates to follow.

This was 2006. Marvel was two years away from launching its cinematic universe. The writers' strike of 2008 was around the corner, which accelerated the reality television boom that never really ended. Streaming was not yet a concern, but studios were already searching for models that were likable, reproducible, and safe. The Devil Wears Prada fit that description perfectly. It was a studio film that looked polished, moved efficiently, delivered its emotional beats, and left audiences satisfied without unsettling anyone.

So they used it. Not the film itself, but its grammar: the clean lighting, the efficient coverage, the emotional legibility, the absence of anything that might alienate a viewer or require a second watch to understand. That grammar became the visual language of an entire era of prestige television and streaming content. Shows like Suits, which launched in 2011, are effectively the same film moved to a different profession, and they look nearly identical. The template locked in and the industry built on top of it for the next two decades.

The result is that almost everything produced in that window shares a family resemblance. Not because the filmmakers lacked talent or ambition, but because the system selected for sameness and punished deviation.

Everything Else Stopped Too

What makes this more than a Hollywood story is that cinema didn't stall in isolation. Look at the surrounding culture and the pattern repeats everywhere.

Cars. The aerodynamic soft-edge design language that emerged in the early 2000s still defines most vehicles on the road today. The Mercedes models that appear in both Devil Wears Prada films are, to any casual eye, essentially the same car. Compare either to a Mercedes from 1986 and the aesthetic distance is enormous: the hard angles, the chrome, the particular bulk of that era's design philosophy belong to a completely different visual world.

Fashion. Every decade from the 1960s through the 1990s had a clearly legible aesthetic identity. The 60s silhouette, the 70s palette, the 80s volume, the 90s minimalism and grunge crosscurrents. After that, the decade-as-aesthetic-statement more or less dissolves. The fashion in the sequel reads, to the average viewer, as contemporary with the original. What is the defining fashion image of the 2010s? Of the early 2020s? The answer is largely a recombination of earlier references, worn slightly differently, filtered through whatever is trending on a given platform that week.

Music. The jump from the synthesizer-driven pop of the mid-80s to the alternative rock explosion of the early 90s to the hip-hop dominance of the late 90s to the post-millennial era of The Devil Wears Prada's release represented genuine seismic shifts in what popular music sounded like and what it meant culturally. The distance between Tears for Fears and Nirvana is immense. The distance between a mainstream pop hit from 2006 and one from 2024 is much harder to locate.

Comedy. Frasier ended in 2004. The Office premiered in 2005. The gap between those two shows represents something real: the end of broad, theatrical, unembarrassed sitcom comedy and the rise of the ironic, documentary-style, shame-aware comedy that has dominated screens ever since. The Office, Parks and Recreation, Abbott Elementary: all brilliant in their own ways, all operating within the same basic grammar of the awkward glance at the camera, the cringe held at a careful distance. Twenty years of the same formal approach to comedy, where before that twenty years would have produced multiple distinct movements.

What Devil Wears Prada 2 Knows

What is most striking about Devil Wears Prada 2 is that the film itself seems to understand all of this, even if only intuitively. The things that have visibly changed between the two films are phones and social media. And in the sequel, those are precisely the forces cast as villains: social media is killing journalism, hollowing out the magazine industry that the original film celebrated, flattening the taste and judgment that Miranda Priestly embodied, for better or worse.

But the sequel's sharpest observation lies in the nature of its central conflict. The true villain is not social media itself. It is a billionaire who wants to use AI to replace fashion, to automate taste, to industrialize the very thing that the original film treated as an almost sacred form of human discernment. He sees this as progress. It isn't. AI, by its nature, is a synthesis of everything that already exists: it averages the past, recombines it, and presents the result as novelty. A future built on it would not be a leap forward. It would be an endlessly refined version of where we already are, generated at scale and at a fraction of the cost of hiring Miranda Priestly.

And that is precisely the point. The billionaire's vision is not really about the future at all. It is about replacing an expensive, irreplaceable human being with a system that produces acceptable results cheaply. Miranda understands this, which is why her instinct is to fight for the world that existed before: the 2006 world of the original film, where taste was embodied in a person, where authority was earned through judgment no algorithm could replicate, where the chaos of human creativity could not yet be optimized away.

So the conflict at the heart of the sequel is not between the past and the future. It is between two kinds of retreat. The billionaire mistakes automation for progress while actually just mining the past for profit. Miranda fights to return to a moment when human expertise still held its ground. Neither is moving forward. And the film, perhaps without fully intending to, captures exactly the cultural condition the last twenty years produced: a world so locked into what already exists that even its visions of the future are just rearrangements of the past.

Why It Happened

The stagnation has an economic explanation and a social one, and they reinforce each other. But to understand either, you have to start with the thing that happened the year after The Devil Wears Prada came out.

In January 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage and introduced the iPhone. It was, by any honest measure, a genuine rupture: a device that changed what a phone was, what a computer was, and how human beings related to both. The original iPhone looked nothing like the phones in The Devil Wears Prada. It was a legitimate leap.

And then, almost immediately, it stopped leaping.

Within a few years the basic form factor was established: a glass rectangle of a certain size, running apps behind a touchscreen, carried everywhere in a pocket or hand. Every phone made since is a refinement of that template. The cameras improved. The screens got sharper. The processors got faster. But the fundamental object, what it looks like, how it works, what you do with it, has not changed in any meaningful way for the better part of fifteen years. If the flip phones in The Devil Wears Prada mark it as 2006, a contemporary iPhone would not mark a film as any particular year within the last decade. They are all just the glass rectangle, in slightly varying proportions.

This is the irony at the center of the whole period. The one invention that looked most like a cultural rupture, the device that was supposed to liberate communication and put a creative tool in everyone's pocket, turned out to be the mechanism that froze everything else. The smartphone did not open culture up. It closed it down.

The reason is embedded in how the device works. When everyone carries a camera at all times, and when everything captured can be instantly published and permanently archived, the cost of a public misstep becomes much higher. Nobody dances at parties anymore because someone might be filming. Nobody takes a genuinely weird creative risk because the discourse around failure is now inescapable and searchable forever. Social media, which grew up alongside the smartphone and depends on it entirely, amplified this dynamic into something totalizing. The platforms rewarded what was already legible and punished what was strange or difficult. Engagement metrics made aesthetic conservatism look like wisdom.

On the economic side of the entertainment industry, the same logic applied. When a studio executive greenlights a project, their career is on the line. A safe film that underperforms is a disappointment. A bold film that fails is a firing offense. Set a goal you can achieve, not a goal worth achieving. The system rewards the completion of modest ambitions and treats genuine swings as recklessness.

The result is that creative risk-taking gets pushed to the margins and treated as an anomaly when it succeeds. When a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once breaks through with its maximalist, formally chaotic, emotionally overwhelming approach, the response is genuine surprise. Audiences react with something close to relief, as if they had forgotten that films could make them feel that way. But the industry doesn't conclude from this that audiences want more daring work. It concludes that the Daniels got lucky, or that there is a small niche for that kind of thing, and returns to the template.

The smartphone and social media were supposed to be liberating forces. In many ways they were. But culturally, the net effect was a profound conservatism. A world in which everyone is always watching and everything is always recorded is not a world that tolerates the embarrassment of genuine experimentation. And art that cannot afford to be embarrassing cannot afford to be new.

The Generation That Never Saw the Leap

Here is the part that is genuinely unsettling.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, major cultural shifts happened roughly generationally. Each new wave of artists grew up watching the previous wave, identified what they wanted to push against or destroy, and made something new enough that the rupture was visible. The rupture was part of the point. Punk was a rejection of prog rock. Grunge was a rejection of hair metal. New Hollywood was a rejection of the studio system that preceded it. Independent cinema in the 90s was a rejection of the safe, corporate filmmaking that had calcified around the blockbuster model.

These movements required people who had seen what came before clearly enough to want to burn it down, and who believed that burning it down was possible. They required a culture that had some tolerance for the discomfort of newness, some appetite for being destabilized.

The generation now entering creative life, the people who will make the films and music and television of the next twenty years, grew up entirely within the stagnation. They have never experienced a major cultural rupture as participants. They have not lived through a moment when the dominant aesthetic of an era collapsed and something genuinely different rose to replace it. The only transformation of their lifetimes that looked like a rupture was the smartphone, and as it turned out, that rupture ultimately served to reinforce the very conservatism it appeared to challenge.

This raises a real question. Not a rhetorical one. If you have never seen a genuine cultural leap happen, if your entire frame of reference for what film and music and television look like is built from twenty years of the same formal grammar, do you know how to make the leap? Do you know what it feels like to want something so different that you're willing to risk making something that might not work, that might confuse or alienate or fail entirely?

The tools exist. The talent exists. The appetite, when something genuinely surprising breaks through, clearly exists. What may not exist anymore is the shared cultural memory of what rupture looks like, and the collective permission to attempt it.

What Comes Next

The villain of Devil Wears Prada 2 offers one answer to that question: let the billionaires decide. Let AI flatten taste into something manageable and monetizable. Let the future be a cleaner, more optimized version of the present, indefinitely. It is a coherent vision. It is also a creative death sentence.

The other answer is harder to articulate because it hasn't happened yet. But history suggests what it will look like when it does. It will not come from the center. It will not be greenlit by a studio or endorsed by an algorithm. It will be loud, probably ugly in places, almost certainly embarrassing to someone. It will be made by people who grew up inside the stagnation and became so frustrated by it that they stopped asking for permission to do something different.

Every generation that has ever reshaped culture did so by refusing to accept the aesthetics handed to them as inevitable. Punk did not politely request a place at the table. Grunge did not ask whether the industry was ready. They simply made something that the existing system had no framework for, and the existing system had to reorganize around it.

That is what is needed now. Not a new platform, not a new algorithm, not a billionaire's vision of optimized creativity. What is needed is for the generation that has grown up surveilled, self-conscious, and algorithmically managed to find, somewhere in that experience, something worth burning down. To make work that the last twenty years of cultural conservatism has no category for. To be, in short, genuinely new.

Twenty years of stagnation is a long time. But it is also a very long buildup of pressure. At some point, something gives.

Postscript

Everything observed in this piece is drawn from a particular vantage point: American and Western European culture, its films, its music, its cars, its comedy, its phones. That context is worth naming, because it is not the only one.

Consider China in 1986, then in 2006, then in 2026. The transformation across those two twenty-year spans is, by almost any measure, staggering. Cities that didn't exist. Industries built from scratch. A physical and cultural landscape that looks nothing like what preceded it. The same could likely be said of other parts of Asia and elsewhere.

Which raises a question this piece can't fully answer: is the stagnation described here a universal condition of the modern world, or a specific condition of cultures that, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, stopped changing? The honest answer is that it's probably the latter. Why that happened is a harder question, and one worth sitting with.