With The Devil Wears Prada marking its twentieth anniversary and the highly anticipated sequel to be released this week it’s essential to reflect on how the fashion industry has shifted.
Cerulean blue is everywhere. Not on the runway first, nor filtered through buyers or glossy editorials – but embedded in the scroll. With influence being heavily packaged into outfit grids, the ways to style blue videos, algorithm-approved capsule wardrobes. By the time fashion caught up, the colour had already been decided.
Which makes one thing clear: the system has changed.
DICTATORS OF TASTE
In The Devil Wears Prada, cerulean famously symbolised fashion’s top-down machinery. The cogs were turned by designers, governed by powerful print editors, and gate-kept from the masses. Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly laid it out as an inevitability – something that you cannot avoid being a part of even if “you think [it] has nothing to do with you.”
“When, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of stuff.”
But in 2026, that inevitability looks different. Trends no longer trickle. They accumulate. Now it’s a phone-first phenomenon.
CERULEAN: THE ALGORITHM MADE IT INEVITABLE
Cerulean’s return wasn’t announced – it was relentlessly repeated, over and over again. The same shade appeared across thousands of posts until it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a given.
TikTok doesn’t just surface trends; it compresses them. What once took seasons now takes weeks, driven less by authority and more by visibility. The more you see something, the more it feels right – and the faster it becomes real.
WHEN COLOR BECOMES A COMMODITY
Anticipation alone has become a catalyst, with fashion responding not to the release itself, but to the cultural memory surrounding it. In 2026, a trend doesn’t need to arrive. It just needs to be expected.
We’ve seen this before, just recently, and at scale. The release of Barbie didn’t just inspire a trend; it effectively cornered one. The hyper-specific shade of pink tied to the film became so in-demand that brands and manufacturers reportedly struggled to keep up, with supply chains feeling the pressure of a single colour story.
Cerulean is moving differently, but the principle holds. Colour is no longer just aesthetic – it’s economic. When a shade hits cultural saturation, it doesn’t just influence what we wear; it dictates what gets produced, stocked, and sold.
A NEW FASHION CYCLE
Cerulean still represents the system – but not the one it once did. No longer dictated from the top, it now emerges from a constant loop of creation, repetition, and reinforcement. Propelled by social media and hyper saturation of fast fashion, trend cycles have compressed from years into weeks.
What’s changed? The increasingly fast capacity for fast fashion brands to recreate runway looks means key seasonal trends are finding their ways into stores, closets and charity bins before couture has a chance to hit the racks.
Even Anne Hathaway herself, asserted her resistance to part-take in a sequel in a 2024 Vanity Fair interview, as “the media landscape is digital these days,” a mismatch to the original film. So how does this film exist in this changed landscape?
In the new film, Andy Sachs returns as Runway’s features director, steering the ship of an aging print magazine into a new direction for the future. But another risk weighs heavy – in trying to be fresh and relevant the film could swing too far to the other side, void of real substance or creativity, as frequently does happen with reboots.
