First Impressions: How 'The Devil Wears Prada' Introduced Its Most Powerful Character

Sometimes it’s a grand entrance, sometimes just a fleeting glance. Either way, a character’s first appearance carries more than meets the eye—a signal of their desires, their secrets, or the path that waits ahead. First Impressions is an ongoing series for Scene and Unheard that lingers on those opening moments, tracing how a single scene can reverberate through everything that follows.

The first thing you notice about Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) isn’t how she looks or acts, but how others react to her. The sudden flurry. The way a sleek women’s fashion magazine jolts into crisis mode at the mere sound of an elevator. “Gird your loins,” Nigel (Stanley Tucci) warns, and the Runway staff scatters like they’re bracing for a storm.

Miranda’s entrance begins long before she appears. The office tells the story for her—its panic, its choreography, its reverence. At the center of the film is Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), the aspiring journalist who steps into this world without yet understanding the cost of the ambition it runs on.

Then the elevator doors part.

She steps into frame wearing a coat that could merit its own credit line, her expression set in that cool, unreadable glance that has undone many before her. There’s no introductory line, no dramatic swell. She moves with the quiet certainty of someone who has never needed to justify herself. Every gesture is measured: a lifted chin, a brief sweep of the room, an outstretched hand receiving a coat.

What makes this entrance legendary isn’t just the physical choreography—the shedding of layers, the practiced motions of assistants catching pieces of her wardrobe—but what it understands about authority itself. Real power doesn’t announce. It rearranges. The room shifts around Miranda without her asking. It moves to her instinctively, magnetically, the way certain people can silence a room simply by entering it.

Streep built Miranda’s voice on the low, unhurried cadence of executives who understand authority rarely needs volume. It’s a choice that defines everything. Miranda speaks sparingly in her introduction, yet every employee reacts as if reprimanded. The fear is anticipatory. The discipline is preemptive.

That vocal restraint becomes the film’s secret weapon. Listen to how Miranda issues commands: “That’s all” arrives like punctuation on a sentence you didn’t realize had ended. Her dismissals feel final because they’re delivered with the same emotional temperature as her praise, which is to say, almost none at all. She has perfected the art of making people desperate for a reaction she’ll never fully give.

This opening contains everything the film wants to say. The Devil Wears Prada is a story about the allure of excellence and the toll it exacts, and Miranda represents both truths the second she appears. She’s ambition’s glamour and its cost, aspiration and warning wrapped in the same perfect silhouette. Her expectations feel impossible because she holds herself to something even harsher. You see it in the way she moves: controlled, calibrated, precise. The introduction reveals the bargain before anyone mentions it.

The scene also captures something specific about early-2000s media culture, when magazine editors occupied a cultural throne. Miranda walks into Runway like the ruler of a kingdom, a world defined by gatekeeping and taste that approached art. Her entrance signals that this realm—intoxicating, unforgiving, already beginning its slow fade—is in full command of itself, even if its reign won’t last forever.

Andy feels that shift immediately, and we feel it through her. Miranda’s arrival lands harder because we’re watching through the eyes of someone who doesn’t yet understand the stakes. Andy begins the scene unimpressed, even amused by the theater of it all. Then reality settles in. Their entire dynamic—mentor, tormentor, mirror—is seeded in this first meeting, in the moment Andy realizes she’s walked into something far more complex than a job.

There’s something surprisingly vulnerable in how the scene unfolds, too. The film could have portrayed Miranda purely as a monster, but what Streep offers instead is a woman shaped by survival and sacrifice, someone who sharpened herself to withstand an industry ruled by scrutiny and obsolescence. You see the steel in that entrance, but you also glimpse the exhaustion beneath it, the toll of maintaining that level of control every hour of every day. The fear Miranda commands isn’t just about her authority. It’s about recognizing how much it costs to hold it.

I think about this entrance whenever I’m tempted to confuse excellence with ease. Miranda walks into that office with the accumulated weight of everything she’s sacrificed to earn the right to walk that way. The staff scatters not just because she’s exacting, but because they understand, on some instinctive level, what it takes to become the person everyone watches.

That’s the brilliance of Miranda’s debut in The Devil Wears Prada: it’s an entrance, a character study, and a warning. A life and legacy condensed into seconds, punctuated by immaculate coats and the kind of silence that demands attention without asking. Streep plays her with such magnetism and control that nearly two decades after the film’s release—with a sequel arriving next year—the character remains cinema’s definitive portrait of creative power and its price.

Miranda stepped out of that elevator once, and the culture never stepped back.