The Magazine Girl Is Dead! Long Live the Magazine Girl!

The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes us long for one of our generation’s most beloved archetypes.

Recently, like many other magazine-loving geriatric Millennials, I went to see the Devil Wears Prada 2. And recently, like many other geriatric millennials, I wondered two things: First, how is it possible that 20 whole years have passed since the movie’s first installment? And second, where on earth did all the Magazine Girls go?

Not the sleek “clackers” as Andy Sachs famously dubbed them in the original. Those magazine girls with perfectly coordinated outfits, shoes that went “clack, clack, clack on the floor of the lobby,” and who looked like they’d been manufactured on a snooty fashion girl assembly line.

I’m talking about the other ones, the ones who didn’t have designer everything. The suburban, working-class girls who had big-city dreams and a love of magazines. The ones who didn’t have parents with connections, elderly grandmas with vintage Chanel to borrow, or an encyclopedic knowledge of runway shows. The ones who didn’t already write a buzzy blog but who all had one thing in common: a willingness to learn on the job. Once upon a time they were everywhere in movies and TV, from 13 Going on 30 to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Ugly Betty to Confessions of a Shopaholic.

In today’s world, where career ambition feels like a tightly choreographed personal PR performance engineered from the start of high school, it’s tempting to dismiss the 2000s perfectly imperfect Magazine Girl as an improbable fairytale. If not just a narrative device concocted by Hollywood as a way to parachute an unlikely fish-out-of-water into the rarified world of women’s magazines. But she actually existed and she actually gave young women a blueprint for career aspiration.

I should know, I was one of them. 

The year was 2001, I was 23 and as I sat in the audience of an elementary school Christmas play in a southern English village hours away from civilization, I managed to elegantly stumble into what would become an eight-month position at a prestigious women’s magazine in London. I had no writing clips, no student media experience from college, no fiery self-belief. But with a French degree, a temping job as an interpreter at an insurance company, and a desire to do something creative, to the chestnut-haired woman I chatted with between acts, I somehow seemed capable enough to invite up to London for an interview. 

She, in a blush floor-length wool coat that glowed amid a sea of black anoraks, who tinkled with stacked silver rings and bracelets and somehow smelled like a childhood Majorcan vacation, turned out to be the beauty director of a women’s glossy. And of course, I immediately said yes. 

Once in London, true to archetypal movie form, my Magazine Girl life swerved reliably between the glamorous, the unglamorous, and the downright gross. For several months, I crashed at my cousin’s student digs, sharing her bed, reliving childhood sleepovers at our grandparents, and making up new in-jokes until the wrinkle I was putting in her love life threatened to become a permanent crease. 

After that, one of my guy friends from college offered to let me sleep on the floor of his house share. Thanks to a harvest of moss growing in the bathroom and a crop of marijuana plants in a downstairs closet, it was a lifestyle sustained by the daily deployment of entire stashes of free press samples from spas and fragrance houses so as to not trail a musty herbaceous funk into the office. 

Yet, whenever I was at work, I felt far from alone. There were four bustling women’s titles on our floor, which meant there were more than a handful of other newbies like me. Fresh-faced and wide-eyed, not yet at ease with how our bodies and expressions should occupy the sleek 1970s-does-1930s shiny granite décor of the building, our eyes would timidly meet in the elevator as we beat a well-worn trail down to the mailroom.

When I look back at those days and wonder where I got my pluck from, I know for sure there was a heady cocktail of early 2000s white-girl privilege and sheer right-place-right-time serendipity at play. In Britain, I know I was lucky to live in an era of free college education, unsaddled by debt. But just as importantly, I know I was lucky to feel that pop culture had my back too. 

After all, throughout the late 1990s and the dawn of the new millennium, there were plenty of movies like Sliding Doors, Bridget Jones, and even The Princess Diaries which nudged the idea that the job of all awkward 20-somethings was to triumph majestically. Whether that be in media, PR, publishing, or elsewhere. Everywhere you looked you could find stories about underdogs figuring it out, learning on the job, and struggling through with little more than a fat dose of eagerness and an ability to string a few sentences together. In Almost Famous, even a scrawny teenager managed to parlay his fandom into becoming a celebrated music writer.

Perhaps that’s why, dressed in my bland wardrobe of secretarial clothes, not even the threat of fashion elitism fazed me. In London, 2002 was the era of the shrunken velvet military blazer, of the skinny knit scarf worn looped around the neck, of tissue-thin boho blouses and low-slung jeans. At work, the young editors aped anything and everything that looked like the then fledgling Marc by Marc Jacobs line. The older ones worshipped Phoebe Philo, whose collections for Chloé wafted with Ibiza-goes-to-Paris hippie chic. But despite that, my rolling selection of navy and black polyester pants, pencil skirts, and cotton button-down shirts never felt like mortifying markers of my outsider-hood. To me, they were just a blank fashion canvas which I knew I could learn to add color to over time.

And add color, I did. There was no Andy makeover moment, no fashion fairy godmother Nigel standing on the threshold of the fashion closet to plop stilettos into my hands. While I could, and certainly did, regularly pore over the pieces couriered in for fashion shoots, every item was strictly accounted for. But gradually I did manage to cycle in a few of my own inspired finds. There was a navy Marc Jacobs dupe blazer from H&M, a Chloé-esque long fringy suede belt from a flea market, a pair of red pointed flats which felt very Sex in the City, and some vintage floral skirts. 

There were other lessons I grasped too. Like how to not embarrass yourself in public with a gauchely pristine and stiff Birkin bag. “Fill it with bricks, wrap a hammer in an old sweater and bash it!” I overheard a fashion writer once instruct a bookings editor with earnestness. Or how to never place an ad for a panty liner on the reverse of a super-glamorous fashion editorial. Unless, that is, you have checked that panty-liner hats are in season.

By the end of my time at the magazine I was writing copy, helping to research features, and learning how to create the perfect balance of breathlessly alliterative phrasing for beauty advertorials. All skills I took into the PR, copywriting, brand communications, editorial, and translation jobs I’ve done in the decades since. All skills I’m thankful to have honed within a high-pressure atmosphere. And all skills I’m happy to have done with the Magazine Girl archetype silently cheering me on in the background.

Watching the latest Devil Wears Prada then, with its takedown of how the consolidation of magazine publications has sucked the soul out of journalism, I’m not just saddened that the budget for a next generation of Magazine Girls has all but dried up. I’ve felt saddened that the generations that have followed mine haven’t been given a similar scrappily imperfect archetype to look to for inspiration and aspiration. Or at least some type of copy-and-paste refresh.

Instead, with the only entry-level character to speak of being the hyper-qualified Jin Chao, I’m sad that teens are growing up feeling that perhaps only an Ivy League education, a perfect GPA, a full book of student journalism clips, an impeccable resume of volunteer work, and a lifelong plan to work in media qualifies them to benefit from some publishing experience. 

To borrow the language of Carrie Bradshaw, the doyenne of all 2000s Magazine Girls: I can’t help but wonder if that is not where the true power of the OG Magazine Girl really lies. That she belongs to us Millennials and Baby Gen Xers. And us alone. Because, having weathered financial, political, and existential storms from 9/11 to the subprime mortgage crisis, the pandemic to the gutting of reproductive rights, maintaining the scrappy, struggle-through adaptability of the Hollywood Magazine Girl is something we have all had to do. Magazine job or no magazine job.

As for me, like many others my age who started editorial careers in the early 2000s, I’m now spinning into my third, fourth or, let’s be honest, hundredth career pirouette. Now living in America, now shopping a nonfiction book proposal of my own, I stifled a mixture of laughter and tears as I saw how The Devil Wears Prada 2’s storyline so deftly echoes my reality and that of so many of my fellow writer friends. But best of all, seeing Andy verbally battle AI evangelists as I so often do, seeing her fiercely defend the value of print publishing and of funding newsrooms, and finally seeing her rush to resurrect a magazine’s fortunes, I’m reassured that the Magazine Girl perhaps didn’t go completely extinct. She simply grew up. 

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