Anne Hathaway’s character bought her sweater when it wasn’t fashionable. The fashion industry’s cerulean campaign had come and gone. Then, after the fact, she saw the sweater and liked it. If Meryl Streep (I mean her character) could explain that the girl liked cerulean because the fashion industry had told her to like it, then all right. Instead, her big speech tells us how a sweater of a given color happened to be at hand when the girl was shopping. There’s a strict hierarchy to the process being described, so the situation looks very upstream and downstream. Upstream there are Oscar de Laurenta and Yves Saint Laurent, plus Miranda Priestly (the Streep character) and Runway. Downstream there’s Andy (the Hathaway character) standing in “some tragic casual corner” and holding a cerulean sweater. The girl has no idea how it got into her hand! A crushing case by the villain of The Devil Wears Prada.
But Andy knows how the sweater got in her hand. She liked the sweater for her own reasons, none of them implanted by the fashion industry—since the film makes very clear that Andy’s clothing instincts and those of the industry are a long way apart. What her boss is explaining is how the sweater got into the bin. Somebody had to think cerulean was a good idea before a cerulean sweater could come to be, and the fashion industry’s set-up made that person somebody at a top design house. Andy didn’t know this, so therefore she must be clay being shaped by a vast process that’s beyond her. But really, being unfashionable, she’s picking through the inspirations of various years past. Keep up with fashion and maybe you’re stuck with what Vogue (or Runway) tells you to buy. Lag behind and I expect there’s more variety, since the fashion industry has inspirations every year and they’re going to pile up. With Andy as an example, it looks like a woman can root through all this and assemble something that suits her fine but appalls fashionistas. That’s freedom, even if Yves Saint Laurent was selling “cerulean military jackets” a few years back.
Priestly’s speech is a barefaced example of the “on high” gambit. Zoom out the argument to some lofty perspective and you’re the one who’s getting at the big truths instead of gassing around with secondary issues. But not necessarily. First, various angles of view can be found up there; some other big truths may torpedo your big truths. And in the case of Andy’s sweater, a small truth proves enough. Priestly, sliding into her final crusher of a sentence, lets Andy know that her sweater’s color “represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of ‘stuff.’” It wasn’t selected for her, it was made available to her. The story of The Devil Wears Prada is that the industry had no influence on the girl until she was trapped in Runway’s offices and industry members could gang up on her. That’s the premise of everything we see except the big speech.
Note “it’s sort of comical.” The speech also has “blithely unaware,” and it uses “some tragic casual corner” to describe the department store nook where Andy’s supposed to have found the sweater. It’s a huffy speech, the kind people save in their heads when life goes against them and they dream about straightening everyone out. Seeing such a speech done well—not logically, but well—may counteract whatever vague doubts a viewer might feel when watching the scene. In Pulp Fiction, it makes no practical sense for Jules to terrorize that poor boy before shooting him; in fact, Jules becomes so distracted that he can’t tell when someone’s sneaking up on him with a gun. But people love the Ezekiel speech. It’s the kind of moment they’d dearly love to have, the moment when (you could swear) everything’s on your side and the world grovels. Miranda’s speech delivers something similar, the great dressing-down where you show how wrong and miserable the other person is. Devil’s highlight doesn’t match its story, but people love them both because logic isn’t box office.