In “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” the offices of the fashion magazine Runway have become a moderately kinder, gentler place. Two decades after we first met her, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), the indomitable editor-in-chief, still demands perfection from her staff, but her mid-meeting insults are more sniffy than withering, and even her sharpest glare no longer has quite the same serrated edge. Over the years, Miranda has been slapped on the wrist enough times by human resources to curb her abuses. Now, rather than flinging her coat at some trembling lackey, she has to hang it up herself, and you see her wince from the strain—a sign of age, perhaps, but also of humiliation. Even journalistically, she’s unusually off her game. Her opening scene involves a rare editorial lapse that tables her dream of a promotion to the top ranks of Runway’s parent company, Elias-Clarke. The magazine, too, is a shadow of its former self, and the horrors of corporate consolidation and downsizing loom. How bad can it get? In this movie, even Miranda Priestly flies coach.

The first “Devil Wears Prada,” released to major success in the summer of 2006, was adapted from Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling 2003 novel, which drew on her experience as an assistant to Anna Wintour, then the editor-in-chief of Vogue. Weisberger’s book may have been an opportunistic takedown, but the director David Frankel and the screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna spun it into one of the finer Hollywood entertainments of its era, with the pleasing sophistication and bitchery of a classic studio comedy from the forties or fifties. (Call it “All About Yves Saint Laurent.”) Miranda, a shrieking one-note villain on the page, was reborn, in Streep’s performance, as the most exquisite of holy terrors: a silver-haired, dulcet-toned fascist of the fashion world, as thoroughly impossible as she was ultimately irresistible. Streep’s second go-round, by contrast, unfolds as a series of micro-indignities—a plunge from her Olympian perch, one stumble at a time.

Rest assured that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is, no less than its predecessor, a glossy Manhattan fairy tale, and one so overstuffed with top-of-the-line fabrics that cushy landings are all but certain. The sequel is also a first-class reunion tour, with at least three ludicrously extravagant stops—a villa in Vermont, a retreat in the Hamptons, an overextended Milan Fashion Week—and all the principal players faithfully reporting for duty, Frankel and McKenna included. Stanley Tucci is back as Nigel, Miranda’s unfailingly loyal consigliere, who never butchers a bon mot or wears the same pocket square twice. Emily Blunt, whom the first “Prada” made a star, returns as Miranda’s chippy-chic former assistant Emily Charlton; she now oversees luxury retail at Dior, a position that allows her to exact the odd measure of revenge on her old boss.

The story’s most significant character, save Miranda herself, is Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who once toiled alongside Emily in the assistant trenches and finally surpassed her. Andy was the magazine’s resident ugly duckling turned overachieving swan, though she ultimately abandoned the nest for a lowlier, ostensibly more serious career as an investigative reporter. Getting Andy back into the Runway fold is the first of the sequel’s many contrivances, but one with a queasy note of plausibility: early on, she and many of her newspaper colleagues are unceremoniously sacked via text message, a culling that might bring to mind, among other journalistic bloodbaths, the recent gutting of the Washington Post. With suspiciously fortuitous timing, Andy is snapped up as Runway’s new features editor—a move that Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), the Si Newhouse-esque head of Elias-Clarke, hopes will salvage what remains of the publication’s credibility in the wake of Miranda’s bungle.

Miranda, for her part, scarcely remembers Andy, vehemently opposes her hiring, and waits, with sadistic patience, for her to fail. The two women are thus locked into the same power dynamic as before, and although Andy has the benefit of more clout and experience—plus the support of Runway’s next generation of assistants, deftly played by Helen J. Shen, Simone Ashley, and Caleb Hearon—she will once again have to earn Miranda’s grudging respect. The script has a shrewd manner, more endearing than exasperating, of repackaging the same elements under heightened circumstances, and Frankel and McKenna have largely mastered the art of the callback: shower steam being wiped off a bathroom mirror, a Madonna-scored dress-up montage. The best allusions are purely visual, and they remind us of the original film’s pop-cultural hold; at one point, we glimpse a familiar-looking turquoise belt that, in keeping with Miranda’s past prophecy, has trickled down from the most exclusive of ateliers to an open-air market. To some extent, the cool commercial logic of the fashion industry—which transforms beautiful, original works into cheaply reproducible goods, season after season—echoes that of Hollywood, which regularly cannibalizes and, yes, franchises its greatest successes. It’s a grind, but not always or entirely a soulless one, and we take its sturdy mechanics for granted at our peril. The very existence of art and beauty can be enough to make the relentless churn seem worth it.

What if even those fleeting pleasures were to vanish for good? The possibility is not exactly nil. McKenna, working this time without the safety net of direct source material, has composed a shiny soap-bubble satire of a doom-laden cultural and journalistic landscape. As bubbles go, this one is easy to burst, but what it reflects back at us isn’t too far removed from the truth. For one thing, the film, an incestuous weave of fiction and reality, is stuffed with wall-to-wall cameos, including Lady Gaga, Donatella Versace, and an effervescent cloud of New York media élites. Yet despite such surface-level glamour, and no small amount of Prada placement, the movie continually undercuts its own self-intoxication. It laments a world in which Runway’s sky-high budgets, standards, and aspirations are unsustainable, the most lavish shoots and stories elicit little more than a scroll and a yawn, and Miranda’s ironclad judgments sometimes go unheeded. Instead, two corporate raiders, a mercenary media-dynasty scion (B. J. Novak) and a vacuous tech bro (Justin Theroux), will determine the future of Runway, an institution they’ll never understand, support, or deserve.

The stakes, in other words, have never been higher, and if the writing can turn leaden with high-mindedness—no less a Renaissance masterpiece than “The Last Supper” is enlisted in service of bolstering Runway’s artistic bona fides—the new film does, in certain respects, prove savvier than its predecessor. In the first “Prada,” Andy was forced to choose between hard news and haute couture, a false moral-professional binary that, in the sequel, has been upended by the sheer desperation of the new media world order. Before, Andy had only to hold on to her ideals; now she has to save a crumbling media empire almost single-handedly. A less agile heroine might have buckled under the weight of the enterprise. But Hathaway once again shoulders Andy’s mix of steeliness and flightiness with consummate grace, and her shifting perspective reshapes our own prejudices—it’s through her eyes that we come to believe that even the gargantuan excesses of Runway are worth defending against the encroaching tyranny of know-nothing billionaire vulgarians. “You’re much more confident,” Emily tells her, in a brief moment of sincerity, and much of the fun here lies in watching Andy tap into that self-belief. No longer one to wither under her boss’s scornful gaze, she becomes, for Miranda—and for her affectionate old mentor, Nigel—an ever more formidable ally.

“The Devil Wears Prada” was a fairy tale with many frogs and nary a single viable Prince Charming. The sequel, sizing up its protagonists and the direness of their professional circumstances, grants them some romantic redemption. Andy gets a decent if colorless new love interest (Patrick Brammall), who works as a real-estate contractor, and even Miranda has found stability and happiness with the latest of her many husbands (Kenneth Branagh). You have to wonder if domestic bliss hasn’t played its role in her defanging, though she resists any real temptation to settle down. “Boy, I love working,” she coos at one point, and in Streep’s sudden smile—as warm and genuine as Miranda is typically contemptuous and frosty—you see two creative geniuses, actor and character, merged into one. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope. As industries and their titans are brought low, this film suggests, the best we can ask for is the satisfaction of doing good work and the lasting friendships we may forge along the way. That’s all. ♦