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This week, Anna Wintour and her cinematic counterpart Miranda Priestly erred by trusting billionaires.

Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada 2 (Photo by Macall Polay/ 20th Century Studios)

During a climactic scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) confronts the woman scheming to replace her as the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine.

“You’re not a visionary,” she sneers at her would-be successor. “You’re a vendor.”

It’s a devastating putdown. And it’s a distinction that Miranda’s real-life counterpart, Vogue global editorial director Anna Wintour should have considered before she asked Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his second wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, to be honorary chairs of the Met Gala.

The man who made a fortune selling toilet paper with free two-day shipping sponsoring the biggest event in fashion? Perish the thought.

The star-studded annual fundraiser, which Wintour has overseen for 30 years, is a reliably fun, frivolous spectacle and celebration of outrageous design. But thanks to the Bezoses’ involvement, this year’s event, held Monday in Manhattan, was mired in controversy — and dulled by underwhelming fashion.

Ahead of the gala, a group called Everyone Hates Elon blanketed the city with ads and clever Banksy-style guerrilla art (including projections and bottles of fake urine stashed around the Met, to protest Amazon’s labor practices and its executive chair’s increasingly cozy relationship with Trump. On Monday, labor organizer Chris Smalls was arrested for jumping the barricades at the gala.

Perhaps because of the controversy, a number of A-listers, including red carpet queen Zendaya, were notably absent from the festivities. Jeff Bezos quietly slithered into the gala without talking to reporters or posing for photos outside the museum, leaving his wife to walk the carpet alone.

Even this year’s theme “Fashion is Art,” felt like a downgrade, an attempt to create a basic version of the event — The Met Gala for Dummies.

A few attendees understood the proverbial assignment, like pop star Sabrina Carpenter, who wore a dress made of film from the classic Audrey Hepburn movie Sabrina, and actor Chase Infiniti, whose boldly colored trompe l’oeil gown was inspired by the Venus de Milo. But the event’s nebulous theme meant that far too many guests just threw on some couture and called it a day. (We’ve all been there, right?)

You have to wonder whether all that Amazon money will end up being worth it for Wintour, especially when the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is supported by the fundraiser, is close to being fully-endowed.

Movie synergy

In what is surely not a coincidence, this year’s gala took place three days after the heavily promoted release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, a bummer of a follow-up to the frothy 2006 comedy that taught millions of people the meaning of the word “cerulean.”

The original film, based on Lauren Weisberger’s roman à clef about her 10-month stint working for Anna Wintour at Vogue, was a shrewd fantasy about life as an ambitious creative professional in New York City — a millennial kid sister to Sex and the City.

It followed Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), an aspiring journalist who lands a job working for Miranda Priestly, the notoriously imperious editor-in-chief of Runway, the fashion-world bible. Directed by David Frankel and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, the film didn’t exactly turn Miranda into the hero of the story, but it did make a convincing case that Andy, for all her idealism, was just as much of a snob as her boss. It also cemented Wintour’s status as a pop culture icon, recognizable to Walmart shoppers and Manhattan fashionistas alike.

Yet for many years — well after the book and movie became massive hits — Wintour could barely mask her contempt for The Devil Wears Prada. (In this 2009 interview with David Letterman, you can see her roll her eyes when asked about the movie, which she curtly dismisses as fiction.) Whether she has mellowed with age or simply realized that it’s an honor to be played by the world’s greatest living film actress, Wintour has since embraced her fictional counterpart. The editor actively participated in the sequel, visiting the set (where she reportedly offered critiques of the floral design), appearing with Streep on the cover of Vogue’s May issue, and starring in a cutesy promo sketch.

Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2. (Photo by Macall Polay/20th Century Studios)

The sequel, which was released Friday and made an impressive $77 million at the weekend box office, picks up roughly two decades later, when the once-glamorous magazine business is in tatters. Recently laid off from a job at an esteemed newspaper, Andy is reluctantly lured back to Runway and tasked with rebuilding the magazine’s reputation in the wake of a scandal.

Her one-time frenemy, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), has left publishing for the supposedly greener pastures of luxury retail — Christian Dior, to be specific. (“Remember when magazines were a thing?” she gloats to Andy.) And she’s now engaged to Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), a recently divorced tech billionaire who has undergone a dramatic glow-up and aspires to fly a rocket ship to the sun. (Any similarities to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk are surely coincidental.)

The one thing at Runway that hasn’t changed? Miranda remains as frosty and formidable as ever, and is poised to step into an even more powerful position at Elias-Clarke Publications, the magazine’s parent company. But then a sudden leadership brings drastic cost-cutting to the magazine and the-once mighty Miranda finds herself flying coach.

Billionaires aren’t your friends

When TDWP2 went into production last year, many observers wondered whether a nostalgia-fueled sequel would be willing to reckon with the cataclysmic changes to the magazine business since 2006. To its credit, the movie (again directed by Frankel and written by McKenna) is clear-eyed about the dismal state of journalism in 2026.

With one rather notable exception. [*SPOILERS INCOMING*]

In the film’s final act, Benji Barnes prepares to buy Runway, oust Miranda, and put Emily at the top of the magazine. So Andy and Miranda convince Benji’s deep-pocketed ex-wife, Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), to acquire Elias-Clarke instead — thereby preserving Miranda’s legacy.

Needless to say, this is not the happy ending the film wants us to believe it is.

In the real world, billionaires are actively shredding journalistic institutions like The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and CBS News. Even if some über-wealthy benefactors, like Laurene Powell Jobs, have been responsible stewards of specific publications, it is (at best) naive for the film to portray a billionaire — even a “good” one like Sasha, who is clearly modeled on Mackenzie Scott — as a journalistic savior.

And Wintour should know as much.

Instead, the editor — who once balked at inviting nouveau riche famous-for-being-famous types like the Kardashians to the Met Gala — has fallen for the same old “good billionaire” ruse.

It began last summer, when Sánchez Bezos was the subject of a truly sick-making Vogue cover story written by Chloe Malle (who became the magazine’s top editor a few months later.)

The puff piece fueled a rumor that Bezos was interested in buying not just Vogue but all of Condé-Nast as a wedding gift for his new bride, a former local broadcast journalist. She denied the rumor in The New York Times (in another fawning profile). But the alliance between Wintour, a major Democratic fundraiser, and the woman who sat in the front row at Trump’s second inauguration, only deepened.

In January, they attended Paris couture shows together while Amazon was laying off 16,000 employees around the world. A few weeks later, the Met quietly announced that the Bezoses would be honorary chairs of the Met Gala (the news was buried on the second page of a press release).

What either Bezos has done for fashion, other than make it easy to order sweatpants in bulk from the comfort of one’s couch, is unclear. But what they have done to journalism, particularly The Washington Post (which won two Pulitzers Monday) is already worse than anything proposed by the soulless McKinsey consultants in TDWP2.

Wintour, the daughter of a successful newspaper editor and one of the most powerful people in publishing, should care about how Bezos and his ilk are dismantling the press in this country.

At least one prominent star appears to. While most of The Devil Wears Prada 2 cast was in attendance Monday night, one person from the cast was noticeably absent: Meryl Streep, who happened to play Katherine Graham in The Post.

Whatever her reason for skipping, I hope she spent the night at home, curled up with a newspaper, magazine, or book she bought at a brick and mortar store.

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Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian