Near the center of The Devil Wears Prada(2006) Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) reacts to Andy Sachs’ (Anne Hathaway) sniggers over her assistants struggle to decide between two similar belts for an outfit asking her blithely, “Something funny?” And when Andy remarks on how similar the belts look, declaring, “You know, I'm still learning about all this stuff,” Miranda illustrates how enormous an effect the clothing industry has on our daily lives:
This... stuff'? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select... I don't know... that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.
Miranda’s brief history of the cerulean sweater and its origin begins to reveal the massive size of the clothing industry, here in relation to fashion. Andy’s sweater demonstrates well that fashion fabric color choices in 2002 trickle down first to other designers, and then to department stores, and finally to the discount store.
Miranda’s speech also makes the point that the fashion industry benefits everyone, providing clothes for multiple socio-economic classes and stimulating the U.S. economy with billions of dollars in profits and “countless jobs” is illustrated well by multiple clothing and fashion industry films. Miranda’s claim is explicitly reinforced, for example, by Robert Altman’s Ready to Wear (1994), a film that attempts to reveal some of the problems with the fashion industry by focusing on various characters’ reactions while preparing for a Paris fashion show. Ready to Wear provides an uncomplimentary portrayal of the fashion industry, a “hate letter” according to Richard Corliss, but a “comedy crossed with a home movie,” according to Roger Ebert. What stands out, however, amid the personal injustices and competitions, is a nod toward the environment missing from most films. At the ready-to-wear show, one reporter asks a designer, “How do you feel that fifty percent of the world’s pollution comes from textile mills,” shocking the designer and prompting the viewer to wonder if she’s right. Do the fashion and clothing industries contribute this significantly to everyday environmental disasters such as air and water pollution?
Although Miranda’s soliloquy, and the films that illustrate its points, address only parts of the fashion, clothing, and textile industries, it also begins to illustrate the industry’s effects on a people and their economy. Like other films addressing fashion and clothing manufacturing industries, The Devil Wears Prada not only reveals the complexity of the design and manufacturing process, but also begins to expose and illuminate the environmental justice issues associated with this industry that helps us meet one of our basic human needs. Similar to other clothing industry films, The Devil Wears Prada, highlights and typically critiques the exploitation of labor and valorizes their efforts to organize, either formally or informally. The film provides a demonstration and multiple individual illustrations of the clothing cycle through personal narratives. It shows the contrast and conflict between urban and rural values and validates figures who become heroic in spite of their humble backgrounds, foregrounding their successful attempts to overcome adversity.
What is hidden in The Devil Wears Prada and other films addressing the fashion and clothing industry, however, is an explicit discussion of how environmental justice underpins the films’ narratives and rhetoric. Although sometimes obscured by the human rights issues examined by the films, both documentaries and fictional films with clothing at the center address environmental issues across races, classes, and genders, beginning to broach the question, how do gender, class, and race intersect with the environment in the clothing industry? Do problems with cotton production enter these films, or do the water and toxicity issues associated with cotton remain hidden? Do the films address our throwaway society and its effects on local industry in developing countries? Do they highlight problems with sweatshops, air pollution, fabrics made with oil? Although most clothing films focus primarily on heroic individuals and class and race conflict, films such as Cotton Road (2013) and Thread: A Documentary (2013) seek to show how some clothing films go further and effectively reveal how social justice issues interconnect with environmental justice concerns.
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