There is a category of power that the law has always found it more convenient to describe than to discipline. Giorgio Agamben, following Carl Schmitt with the unease of a man who knows precisely where the argument leads, called it sovereignty: the capacity to decide on the exception, to suspend the norm while remaining, formally, within it. Schmitt’s sovereign declares the state of exception. Miranda Priestly simply emails at 11 PM and expects the manuscript by morning. The mechanism differs. The jurisprudential structure does not.
The Devil Wears Prada franchise, across both its iterations and with escalating candour in the second, has never been, at its legal core, a story about fashion. It is a study in how certain industries construct what we might call zones of extra-legality: not lawless spaces, but spaces where the ordinary grammar of employment, intellectual property, and fiduciary obligation operates in a register so attenuated as to be effectively ornamental. What the fashion industry achieved, over the second half of the twentieth century with remarkable legislative and judicial complicity, was the consecration of the creative director as a figure who is simultaneously an employee, an author, a brand asset, and an institutional sovereign, categories whose legal incompatibility is resolved not through doctrinal synthesis but through deliberate ambiguity maintained across contract law, IP law, and labour regulation simultaneously.
This is the argument that fashion law scholarship has circled without landing: Miranda Priestly is not an aberration within a system. She is the system’s most legible expression.
The Author-Function and Its Proprietorial Distortions
Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967. The fashion industry did not receive the memorandum, or rather, received it and filed a counter-submission. What the creative directorate model did, with a sophistication that most regulatory frameworks failed to anticipate, was to bifurcate the author-function: concentrating its reputational dimension in the named creative director while distributing its productive dimension across a largely uncredited, inadequately protected workforce. The result is an IP architecture of startling elegance and troubling consequence.
Under the work-for-hire doctrine as it operates across most major fashion jurisdictions, the creative output of design assistants, junior editors, stylists, and trend researchers vests immediately and entirely in the employing entity. This is unremarkable as a doctrinal matter. What is remarkable is the secondary effect: that the creative director, whose contribution is frequently curatorial and directional rather than generative, accumulates authorial prestige that the law then retroactively legitimises through trademark, trade dress, and moral rights frameworks that attach to the name rather than to demonstrable creative origination. The house of Runway, to pursue the franchise’s conceit, does not protect Miranda Priestly’s ideas. It protects the sign Miranda Priestly, which is a categorically different, and legally far more robust, form of protection.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 makes this structure visible in ways the original could only imply. The sequel’s interest in succession, in the question of who inhabits the authority that Miranda’s name has accumulated, is less a character study than an inadvertent treatise on the personality rights of institutional brands. When the question the film cannot quite bring itself to answer directly is whether Miranda’s authority is transferable, it is, without intending to, asking whether the sovereign exception is personal or structural. The answer, from Agamben and from the fashion industry’s actual contractual practice, is that it is always structural. The exception precedes the individual who inhabits it.
Fiduciary Silence and the Ethics of Creative Exploitation
There is a doctrine in corporate law, applied with considerable flexibility and occasional incoherence, called the duty of loyalty. It holds that those in positions of authority over others bear not merely contractual obligations but something approaching a fiduciary obligation: an affirmative duty whose breach cannot be contracted away. Fashion law has, with some notable exceptions in the context of designer non-competes and trade secret litigation, largely failed to interrogate whether the creative directorate relationship gives rise to anything resembling fiduciary character.
This failure is consequential. The relationship between Miranda Priestly and her assistants, as both films construct it, is not simply an employment relationship in the conventional sense. It is a relationship in which the employer exerts authority not merely over the labour performed but over the professional identity of the person performing it. Andrea Sachs is not merely being asked to complete tasks; she is being asked to reconstitute herself, her aesthetic sensibility, her social relations, her relationship to her own time, as instruments of Miranda’s institutional project. The law has a name for relationships of this character when they arise in other contexts. In the mentor-protégé structures of medicine, law, and finance, courts have occasionally been willing to find that the power differential and the scope of influence create obligations that exceed the contractual. Fashion has, with impressive consistency, avoided this analysis entirely.
The doctrinal reason is not difficult to locate: the persistent characterisation of fashion work as aspiration rather than labour. The cultural discourse surrounding the industry, which the franchise both critiques and reproduces, frames proximity to creative power as a privilege whose costs are naturally borne by the one who seeks it. This framing does not emerge from nowhere. It is constructed and maintained through specific rhetorical practices, through the language of opportunity and access and mentorship that has historically inoculated fashion employment relationships against the fiduciary analysis that their actual structure might otherwise invite.
The Exception as Legal Technology
What Schmitt understood, and what the fashion industry intuited without requiring the theoretical apparatus, is that the exception is not the failure of the norm. It is the norm’s most powerful tool. The creative director who operates outside ordinary accountability does not thereby undermine the legal system that governs the industry. She confirms it by demonstrating that the system is capacious enough to contain and to legitimate the concentration of authority that her position represents.
The legal technology through which this is achieved is neither simple nor unsophisticated. It operates across at least three registers simultaneously. In contract law, the personal service nature of creative employment is deployed to restrict worker mobility through non-competes while simultaneously denying workers the relational protections that the personal nature of the engagement might otherwise generate. In IP law, the work-for-hire framework captures creative output upward while moral rights frameworks, where they exist, vest in the employing entity rather than the individual author. In employment law, the at-will character of most fashion employment, combined with the industry’s structural dependence on informal networks of recommendation and reputation, creates a disciplinary apparatus that operates largely outside the formal adjudicative machinery that employment law nominally provides.
The cumulative effect is a workforce that is, in the technical legal sense, extensively protected and, in any practical sense, largely without recourse. Miranda Priestly operates within this system not because she transcends it but because the system was designed, through decades of contractual practice, legislative lobbying, and judicial deference, to produce exactly the kind of authority she exercises. The Devil Wears Prada 2’s particular contribution to this analysis is its suggestion that this authority survives even its nominal holder, that the exception has become so institutionalised as to be self-reproducing. That is not a fashion story. That is a constitutional one.
Towards a Jurisprudence of the Atelier
Fashion law, as an academic discipline with genuine ambitions, must eventually confront the question it has been too polite, or perhaps too implicated, to pose directly: whether the legal frameworks governing creative industries are describing a power structure or producing one. The franchise, for all its considerable pleasures, does the discipline the service of making this question impossible to avoid.
The creative directorate is not a natural phenomenon that law has struggled to categorise. It is a legal construction, assembled from specific doctrinal choices across multiple bodies of law, maintained through the active participation of transactional lawyers, IP practitioners, and employment counsel who have, collectively, built the juridical infrastructure that makes Miranda Priestly possible. The question of whether that infrastructure is defensible, whether the exceptional authority it generates is proportionate to any legitimate interest the law might recognise, is one that the discipline has the analytical tools to address and, thus far, a conspicuous reluctance to deploy.
The devil, it turns out, does not merely wear Prada. She wears, with considerably more structural consequence, the architecture of her own legal impunity. And it fits her perfectly.
That’s all.
