The “girlboss” is back. The term, popularized in the 2014 book Girlboss, once positively connoted a woman who adopted traditional male-coded modes of doing business, but without discarding her aesthetic femininity. Very much a compliment to Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to Lean In (2013), the theory behind girl-bossing was that differences between women and men were mostly aesthetic and stylistic, not psychological or characterological. The 2014 girlboss might have been a mother, for example, but her career would come first regardless. The opposite of a 2014 girlboss was the woman who “stepped back.” In other words, the woman who, per Ann Marie Slaughter’s description in Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, ultimately put her familial and domestic obligations ahead of her professional ambitions. 

　　More than a decade later, “girlboss” means something else. It’s often intended to be negative and mocking, describing a woman who is trading on the appeal of aesthetic femininity to cover her general incompetence—and the devolution of the workplaces she increasingly controls into hotbeds of flimsy, feel-good, DEI-obsessed inefficiency. This downgrade of the “girlboss” has occurred, perhaps inevitably, alongside the rise of the “trad-wife,” i.e., a woman who is understood to bring great ambition and competence to the domestic and maternal sphere, in meaningful substance but also in its curated aesthetics and hollower conceits.

　　As I have written, both the “girlboss” and the “tradwife” are shallow identities—both for those women who embrace them and for those women who use them to disparage women who prioritize and live differently. As I have also written, the perception of women’s instigation of nonsensical workplace culture is mostly about the selection and promotion of infantile nitwits who happen to be women, not about the selection and promotion of women per se. 

　　Nevertheless, outside the bounds of this false binary, there remain important questions about how the fact of being female does and/or should inflect one’s professional ambition, workplace aesthetic, and work/life balance.

　　In the 2000s, before this discourse about girl-bosses, leaning in, trad-wives, and mental loads reflected peripatetic, social-media-induced madness, we had something of a popular sensibility around these questions that, when you look back at it today, feels both refreshing and incomplete.

　　Any feeling, ideology, or desire that drives a given woman or man into a presentist emphasis on what’s “his” and what’s “hers”—and away from eternal focus on the shared foundation of what’s “ours”—is undermining.

　　The 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, based on the 2003 novel of the same name, follows a young, female aspiring journalist (Anne Hathaway) through her year working for the feared and fearsome, also female, middle-aged fashion magazine CEO (Meryl Streep). Andy comes to her job interview as a hard-working yet credulous recent college graduate. She knows little about Runway and less about fashion. But she leaves her job nearly a year later, knowing lots about both—and also about grit, connection, and betrayal. 

　　In its absence of any overarching or self-conscious gender critique (which may have seemed like an indisputable feminist victory 20 years ago but now seems both naïve and bold), the film is a fertile lens through which to reflect on female leadership and ambition.

　　Rewatching The Devil Wears Prada in 2026, I found myself sympathetic to and nostalgic for its celebration of the grueling work ethic that (along with the substantive emptiness that the movie also unsparingly portrays) defined many millennial high achievers but seems to be lacking in many of our Gen Z counterparts. I was a lot less sympathetic, though, to the film’s take on work-life balance. Its ultimate investment in a “carpe diem” kind of presentism seems ultimately to have foreshadowed the popular devaluation of ambition that so many young (and not-so-young) people now embrace—not just with respect to advancement at work, but also with respect to the establishment of a grown-up romantic partnership and an independent adult life.

　　Fashionable Excellence

　　In an era of “soft girl” everything and “quiet quitting,” the sheer, unapologetic competence required at Runway—luxury brands aside—feels like a welcome throwback. But Andy finds that, in the ecology of Runway, luxury brands are assumed to be (and, therefore, definitionally are) inextricable from female professionalism. 

　　By the 2000s, the era of second-wave feminist chic, with its self-parodying androgyny, had long since come and gone. Businesswomen wore clothes that were both feminine and fashionable if they wanted to be taken seriously. 

　　In many ways that do not impact men, a woman’s attire and grooming are a proxy for all kinds of other values. For women who would rather claim a man’s privilege to be truly low-maintenance, these aesthetic expectations and signals of femaleness present a recurring problem. The default for such women, as Andy betrays in her initial impressions of her Runway colleagues, is to write the high-maintenance girls off as useless bimbos. 

　　Now, some of us get away with that facile self-importance, more or less, because we go into academia. There, leave-in conditioner and a little mascara will put even the lowest-maintenance gal decisively in the top quartile of fashionable, feminine self-presentation. (Ask me how I know). 

　　But those proudly low-maintenance ladies who have to contend with the real world are often forced to confront a different, less comfortable reality: Miranda Priestly is really smart. She is a boss, not just literally but also in the colloquial sense of the term. And yet, she spends all that time on her hair, clothes, and make-up.

　　This is the same vexing phenomenon that FBI agent and eternal tomboy extraordinaire Grace Hart observes in Miss Congeniality (2000). Hart goes undercover in the Miss America pageant, presumptuously contemptuous of all her fellow contestants because they are beauty queens. She comes away understanding that, excessive hairspray or not, many of her competitors actually have worthwhile talents. Ones that might be as inextricable from their attention to feminine aesthetics as her unique talents (for example, a willingness to draw her gun under pressure) are from her lack thereof. 

　　Both The Devil Wears Prada and Miss Congeniality are rightly arguing, in part, that if we are going to divorce our perception of female leadership and professionalism from popular stereotypes—the empty-headed fashionista, the man-eating bra-burner (which have now somehow managed to merge into the cringe-inducing girlboss?)—we are going to have to recognize that how long a woman spends on her make up may have less to do with her generally unpleasant, elitist character than some of us want to believe.

　　“If Miranda were a man,” Andy says at one point in the film, “no one would notice anything about her except how good she is at her job.” By this juncture, Andy has already proven that she, too, is quite good at her job. Not just the part that involves the mental labor she came to Runway prepared for, but also the part that involves the aesthetic presentation she didn’t.

　　At bottom, what Andy says is true: Miranda does not promote and identify with Andy because the younger woman discards her chunky cable knit sweaters in favor of fitted mini-dresses. She does so because of the questionable morals and ruthless work ethic that Andy displays, in part by betraying her friend to (in Miranda’s own words) “get ahead.” And in part by donning all the labels.

　　Unlike all the fashionistas working at the magazine, Andy begins wearing makeup and cool outfits not due to a deep-seated need to be fashionable, but due to a calculated bid to appear maximally committed to her job. This concession, flanked by her ability to handle aspects of the merciless Runway grind that other assistants cannot, ultimately endears Andy to Miranda even across their ostensible differences in values, which are elided, as they can only be among women, via shared fashion. 

　　The Boyfriend Ball and Chain

　　The pivotal scene in The Devil Wears Prada occurs after Andy is detained for an important work event (that she didn’t expect to attend) on her boyfriend’s birthday. She arrives home to find Nate sitting sulkily in the dark. His ostensibly righteous self-pity fills the room and the screen. This is supposed to be Andy’s realization—along with the viewer’s—that she has sacrificed not just her time and energy, but also her soul, to professional ambition. 

　　Having rewatched this interchange between Andy and Nate, I understand why young women today, who cut their teeth on the entertainment of this era, might increasingly view displays of partnership with a boyfriend as embarrassing or undermining.

　　With Nate as the model, I would, too.

　　From day one, Andy claimed that she had accepted the grind at Runway in a bid to generate future professional options. The premise is that if she can survive Miranda, she will have no trouble landing her dream job at another publication. What could be more pathetic than a 20-something guy who puts attentiveness to himself in the here-and-now—not attentiveness to future children, mind you, but to his own 20-something birthday—ahead of this boost to his presumed future wife’s professional future? Shouldn’t Nate have been celebrating, not sulking?

　　The devil, it turns out, doesn’t have to wear Prada. He just has to tell you that this job, this relationship, this life is too hard on you—and too easy on everyone else involved.

　　Is Nate’s inability to celebrate Andy’s hard-fought wins—his consistent disposition to put more pressure on her by making himself a problem rather than a partner—about misogyny? Or, by contrast, does my view of Nate actually smack of misandry? Am I more girlboss-adjacent than I realize, being harder on Nate because he’s male?

　　Andy does get dazzled by Runway, far more than she admits even to herself. Nevertheless, Nate also provided zero support for the sacrifices that he and Andy would have had to make together, even for her to work there in the purely transactional, time-bound way they’d agreed on. In a healthy, marriage-bound relationship, it should not be “you chose to miss my birthday” but “we chose for you to take that professional opportunity.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say that in a committed couple, it’s a red flag for it to be any other way.

　　When I was 22, I was collecting admissions to doctoral programs. One of the admitted student days fell on my then-boyfriend’s (now husband’s) 24th birthday. It literally never occurred to either of us that I would skip the event, or that in going I would be making the choice to prioritize my professional ambition over our relationship. Similarly, a few years later, I was 26 and spending my first wedding anniversary watching movies on the couch by myself in our first apartment. My husband was in the next room, on calls well past the wee hours, closing his first deal in his first closing season in his first job as an attorney. Was I disappointed to miss the dinner reservation he’d made in his naïve belief that the deal would close earlier? Of course. Did I see it as him choosing his career over our marriage? Of course not. Because I was a grown woman, not a spoiled preschooler.

　　After all, we had bigger fish to fry. Like collectively putting ourselves in a position where neither of us would ever need to miss a future child’s birthday. This involved working together like teammates, rather than performing for one another as though still auditioning for commitment. 

　　For all its quaint celebration of Andy’s 20-something grit, when it comes to romance and its tension with women’s professional achievement, The Devil Wears Prada is rather dismal.

　　The biggest problem with Andy and Nate’s relationship isn’t Miranda’s demands or Andy’s determination to spend a year meeting them. It is Nate’s unwillingness to live for tomorrow as a couple. He should’ve been waiting up for Andy, alright. Only not with an attitude—with an engagement ring.

　　Ironically enough, Nate’s myopic self-involvement is the dominant disposition of many mainstream feminists today. They bean-count “mental loads” in order to seek pallid equality as women in politicized, aggregated comparisons to men rather than optimal productivity as wives in intimate, individual partnership with husbands in the service of families.

　　But a sound partnership is actually not about who does what at home, who works where outside the home, or who misses whose birthday. Any feeling, ideology, or desire that drives a given woman or man into a presentist emphasis on what’s “his” and what’s “hers”—and away from eternal focus on the shared foundation of what’s “ours”—is undermining. Of romantic partnership, of family, and ultimately of a society whose strength and order will continue to be predicated on the stability of both.

　　The devil, it turns out, doesn’t have to wear Prada. He just has to tell you that this job, this relationship, this life is too hard on you—and too easy on everyone else involved. Too often, that’s what he appears to be whispering in the ears of today’s youth, female and male alike. The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out May 1. Let’s hope it depicts women (and men) being boss enough to recognize and prioritize what’s important, whether at work or otherwise. We could all use a big screen reminder of how personal and professional ambition, detached from ideology, can look.