Luxury fashion brands are hoping that the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2 will spark enough interest among next-generation consumers—most especially Gen Z— to draw them into fashion’s ultra-premium tier and help lift a personal luxury market that has experienced a two-year downturn.

'For decades, luxury lived in glass boxes—immaculate, distant, and mysterious. You could look at it. You could long for it. But few ever questioned it—reverence was the ritual. That glass is cracking—and being reshaped into a new lens by a generation that doesn’t just consume luxury, they interrogate it. This generation isn’t turning away from luxury. They’re turning it inside out,' said Gina Logan, Kantar.

The ‘Prada’ Sequel Lands—Luxury’s Gen Z Problem Remains

Hit movies and television shows have always been a cultural touchpoint, both reflecting current fashion trends and influencing future ones. The original Devil Wears Prada (2006), following in the footsteps of Sex and the City (1998-2004)—both styled by costume designer Patricia Field—helped bring luxury brands into mainstream pop culture.

Together, the film and series introduced luxury labels to a new cohort of consumers—millennials — and were instrumental in creating a new target “aspirational” customer segment: consumers not raised in affluence, but aspiring to own the status symbols that define it.

During this period, which Bain described as the era of Democratization, the personal luxury market grew from $137 billion in 2001 to $190 billion in 2007, rising 16% from 2005 to 2007 alone.

Luxury brands are hoping that history repeats itself, especially after losing some 55 million active luxury customers from 2022 through 2025—many of them aspirationals. And the industry is facing a next generation of consumers slow to get on their bandwagon.

Bain’s Federica Levato said that the industry “walked away from Gen Z,” but the reality is Gen Z has largely turned its back on the industry.

Pamela N. Danziger is an internationally recognized expert specializing in consumer insights for marketers targeting the affluent consumer segment. She is president of Unity Marketing, a boutique marketing consulting firm she founded in 1992.

www.unitymarketingonline.com