There is a moment in The Devil Wears Prada 2 that Molly Rogers describes like a needle drop. Andy Sachs – reporter, pragmatist, woman who once threw a phone into a Parisian fountain – arrives at a Hamptons estate in a Gabriela Hearst Niki patchwork embroidered maxi dress. It is the kind of dress that costs more than most people’s rent. And she’s wearing a bucket hat with it. “It needed to be like when The Wizard of Oz went from black and white to Technicolor,” Rogers says. “It needed to be this moment of, ‘Wow, we’re in the movie now.’” The Amor y Mezcal bucket hat was Anne Hathaway’s idea – a pitch-perfect synthesis of her character’s personality – and the costume designer loved it immediately. The look is a contender to be this sequel’s “Chanel boots” moment, made iconic in the 2006 smash hit The Devil Wears Prada, though Rogers says she’s waiting for the fans to decide “which look they’re going gaga for”.
This is what costume design looks like when it’s working – not just beautiful clothes, but clothes that tell you exactly who a person is and where they are in their story. Rogers has been doing this for decades, first as creative partner to the singular Patricia Field – with whom she worked on the original The Devil Wears Prada, Sex and the City and Ugly Betty – and now, for the sequel, as lead costume designer. It’s a role she knows well. Rogers took home an Emmy for her work on Sex and the City, one of six nominations across her career. It’s an auspicious turn in a career that started thanks to a psychic who told Rogers her future is in fashion. Armed with a degree in psychology, she went to Field’s store in New York – with dreadlocks and wearing a paper dress – where the legendary stylist promptly hired her to fold T-shirts that same day.
The responsibility of returning to one of cinema’s most fashion-literate universes was not lost on her, including the challenge of updating it for 2026 without falling into cliché. “Things needed to not be part of a trend,” she says of her overarching approach. “I had to pull back on pieces I knew wouldn’t hold up for the next 20 years, no matter how much it hurt to send some items back. The looks needed to last.” Twenty years is a long time in fashion. When the first film came out in 2006, the iPhone didn’t exist. Instagram was a decade away. The characters – Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) and Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) – have aged into a world they didn’t anticipate, and Rogers’ job was to show that on screen without resorting to nostalgia. For Andy, the brief she set herself was both specific and personal. “I wanted to have little nods to feminine menswear,” she explains, “because I worked on the first movie with Patricia Field, and Pat’s distant inspiration for the character was Annie Hall, who wore open vests and ties and rolled up sleeves. And I wanted to continue that in a romantic newsroom look.” The result is a wardrobe built around vintage finds mixed with contemporary pieces, anchored by the kind of easy, intelligent dressing that a woman who has spent 20 years travelling for work would naturally accumulate. “She’s a New Yorker, she’s a smart person, she’s not oblivious to fashion,” Rogers says of Andy. “She learned a few things from her time at Runway.”
If Andy’s wardrobe is a study in earned confidence, Emily’s is pure theatre. “The biggest pursuit in her life is to be iconic,” Blunt says of her character, and Rogers delivered a wardrobe to match. Now a senior figure at Dior, the fan favourite still enjoys lording her power over others. Every shopper on Rogers’ team wanted to dress Emily because they could push the edginess with designers like Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood. Emily wears thigh-high Christian Louboutin boots
to lunch, archival Jean Paul Gaultier to a construction site and a vintage Dior beret to a memorial. One of Rogers’ favourite looks is a Rick Owens gown and vintage silver apron. “She’s completely mad and completely unfiltered,” Blunt shares.
For Miranda, the challenge was different. The fearsome editor is a woman for whom clothing has always been a manifesto – powerful, confident – and Rogers took her cue from Karl Lagerfeld, “who stuck to a uniform that just worked”. “In the first movie, we had cropped jackets and pencil skirts, so that was our roadmap for the sequel,” Rogers explains. Streep brought her own instincts to the fittings with a forensic understanding of her character. At the very first session, both women immediately agreed on Miranda’s gala dress, which opens the film in a showstopping scene. “We both said there is no other option – it has to be red. The devil doesn’t come back in green.” Pierpaolo Piccioli, who had just joined Balenciaga, created the custom ballgown. It was, Rogers says, one of the easiest decisions she made as a costume designer. There are subtler details in the film too. For the Milan scenes, it was essential that Streep wore Armani as a tribute to Giorgio Armani, who passed away during filming. Fans will also pick up fashion Easter eggs woven throughout, from two near-identical belts to a call-back to a certain cerulean sweater. Another artful callback is a tasseled Dries Van Noten jacket that Miranda wears while in a meeting with generic corporate suits – a brilliant juxtaposition that harks back to her gold Bill Blass jacket from the first movie. “It’s a real conversation piece and the first thing I saw that I wanted to show Meryl,” Rogers says. “It’s elevated editrix.”
The fitting room, Rogers is clear, is never a solo act. “I feel like I am more successful at successful costumes when actors of this calibre are collaborative. You need that energy, feedback and discussion in a fitting so that you end up with the best result possible, because that will make for a better movie,” she shares. She only shows the stars items she herself loves, ensuring they have enough options to create their looks. “All of these actors are very, very knowledgeable and know what looks good on them. My job is to get it in the room.”
Rogers applies the same instinct to her own wardrobe. For the film’s London premiere, she reached into her closet and decided on a blue gown, simple and fluid, that she describes as a “heightened kaftan”. She looked at the label: Mohamed Benchellal, the Moroccan-Dutch designer who won the 2020 Vogue Arabia Fashion Prize and the 2021 Fashion Trust Arabia prize for eveningwear. “I adore easy dressing like that, and it moved in the wind,” she says of the look. Of the region, she says, “I love that part of the world.” “I think there’s a lot of great fashion talent there. It’s different, it’s creative, it’s colourful.” Having built her career on making the off-beat mainstream, Rogers is still, clearly, having the time of her life. “I just kept saying to myself, ‘A million girls would kill for this job, so enjoy it.’”
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of Vogue Arabia
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