Photo: Courtesy of Everett Collection/�Walt Disney Co./Courtesy Everett Collection
Spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada 2 below.
The business of journalism is in peril, both in the real world and in the world of The Devil Wears Prada 2, where Miranda Priestly’s Runway is threatened by McKinsey consultants, a sweat-tech-clad failson, pushy advertisers, and an AI-obsessed tech billionaire named Benji Barnes, who is more than a little reminiscent of Jeff Bezos. That character, played by Justin Theroux in hairline-raising prosthetics, is famously divorced from an ultraprivate, altruistic philanthropist (Lucy Liu). And after a makeover that has turned him into a more muscular version of himself, he mixes with fashion people thanks to his new girlfriend, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt). Sound familiar?
Since Bezos linked up with Lauren Sánchez Bezos, we’ve seen the couple at Paris Fashion Week and photographed in the pages of Vogue. Sánchez Bezos loves fashion — she even commissioned Monse suits for her gals’ trip to outer space. And on Monday, the couple will be front and center at fashion’s biggest night, the Met Gala, where they are the lead sponsors and co-chairs. Sánchez Bezos never had the “job a million girls would kill for,” but both she and Charlton love designer logos and showing a little cleavage at solemn occasions. (Charlton at a funeral, Sánchez Bezos at Donald Trump’s inauguration.)
But the connection between the onscreen couple and the Bezoses sharpens when it’s revealed that Benji wants to buy Runway for Emily, at her request. In recent years, there have been persistent rumors that Bezos and Sánchez Bezos were interested in buying Vogue or Condé Nast, its parent company — and that Vogue’s embrace of the Bezoses was a preamble to the deal. (Recently, Anna Wintour essentially denied that the Bezoses had tried to buy the publisher, as did Sánchez Bezos, who said, “I wish!”) Given things haven’t gone so well at Bezos’s existing media property, the Washington Post, which recently laid off 30 percent of its staff owing to financial problems, it’s probably best for Vogue that the couple have spent their money elsewhere. Similarly, in TDWP2, Charlton and Barnes initially seem like Runway’s saviors before revealing their true selfish motives.
The movie doesn’t end with a fairy-tale wedding in Venice, but we aren’t the only ones who made the connection between the fictional couple and the Bezoses. A rep for Blunt denied the connection to Variety. (She can’t jeopardize her Met Gala invite!) We’ve reached out to 20th Century Fox and will update when we hear back.
