Not a bit of it - they fell in love with the exotic, fanciful clothes until, in the Sixties, a real marketing revolution occurred and the drastic design styles evident in films became purchasable in Marks and Spencer.That's what Streep's character is talking about in The Devil Wears Prada, and if the trend affected just women at first, now the lads - the footballers, the gangsters, the last pipe-fitters in England - take pride and pleasure in their threads. No, people couldn't buy them, of course - and in those days there was no way for high fashion to be sold in mainstream stores at more modest prices. But we have economies that have nearly given up on products that require strong men for their delivery. So much more of our resources and our invention go into style and goodies so light you can hardly weigh them, items we wear for a season. And it's clear that there's a direct link between the flourishing of the movies and the development of what we call fashion as something that catered to millions of people instead of just an aristocratic elite.In the 1930s, when audiences were having a very hard time, and when standards of lower- and middle-class dress were laughably uniform and anonymous, Hollywood took the chance of showing off the most exquisite and powerful clothes.
Why is the film a hit? Because it places this Cinderella plot in a new setting? Maybe. But my guess is that it's because the audience likes clothes so much that it regards Andy as a wet idiot when she gives it all up. How much better the film would have been if she'd taken on the editor herself and tried to get her job - just like Eve Harrington in All About Eve.My clue to this is a moment when the editor realises that Andy's sack-like turquoise sweater is giving her a sense of moral superiority in the office. Whereupon - and Streep is worth the price of admission alone - the editor delivers an analysis of shabby, poor, humble clothing as just one offshoot of a business or an art that tells people what to wear and how they might look.You can argue that clothing is so much more ephemeral and frivolous than automobiles or heavy consumer goods. She goes back to drab sweaters and she takes a reporting job on a small alternative newspaper.
She goes to Paris for fashion week and she is romanced by charming scoundrels She is at all the hot parties. She gets a taste for it and she looks good - and when the film turns Anne Hathaway into something lovely then it's rivalling the job done 50 years ago with Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, one of the few other films about life on a fashion magazine.But then the "irrelevance" of the job hits Andy, along with pangs of conscience about the boyfriend So she hands in her notice. She has her own nerdy dress sense mocked by everyone in the office. And then she gradually loses her amiable but self-satisfied boyfriend as she becomes more heavily involved in the awful job Why? Because she has fun with it. She learns to dress well She can anticipate the whims of the editor She does good work. The Devil Wears Prada opened a lot better in the United States than "industry experts" had predicted.
