The most talked-about return to the world of Runway magazine is already confronting the friction of a changed cultural order, as a promotional clip for The Devil Wears Prada 2 has ignited calls for a boycott among some Chinese audiences. At the centre of the dispute is Qin Zhou, a character played by Chinese American actor Helen J Shen, who appears as an assistant to Anne Hathaway’s Andrea Sachs. Critics online argue that the depiction veers into stereotype, while the name itself has been flagged as phonetically resembling a historically racist term used to mock Chinese people. The controversy, swelling on East Asian social platforms, presents an immediate reputational test for a sequel that Disney will release globally on 29 April, and underscores how finely studios must now calibrate for the world’s second-largest box office market.

Away from the firestorm, the film’s creative principals have been unveiling a production shaped as much by introspection as by commercial calculation. Meryl Streep, speaking at a remote global press conference, described an iteration of Miranda Priestly no longer assured of her omnipotence. “What I loved about her this time,” Streep noted, in remarks reported by the Italian press, “is that this Miranda seeks beauty but today she feels in danger.” The observation hints at a sequel that intends to interrogate the vulnerability beneath the armour of an icon, two decades after the original film crystallised a particular style of unapologetic female ambition. Returning alongside Streep are Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci, with director David Frankel once again at the helm.

Yet even the assembling of the familiar cast has been accompanied by quiet adjustments. Sydney Sweeney filmed a brief cameo as a celebrity client of Blunt’s character, Emily Charlton, only for the sequence to be cut in what sources described to Entertainment Weekly as a “creative decision”. The excision, confirmed by American outlets, removes a self-referential bridge between the film’s fashion-world satire and current Hollywood hierarchies, leaving the final shape of the narrative slightly more insulated from the present moment.

Viewed from London, the layers of Anne Hathaway’s current prominence illustrate how the promotional cycle for one franchise property can refract through multiple legacies. While discussing her return to the role of Andrea Sachs, Hathaway has simultaneously rekindled enthusiasm for a third Princess Diaries film, telling an interviewer that the team is “constantly working” on it and that “everyone wants it”. The confession, made to an Italian news outlet, feeds a persistent appetite for early-2000s nostalgia that the Devil Wears Prada sequel is itself designed to exploit. In the same window, People magazine named Hathaway the world’s most beautiful woman, an accolade she accepted with a definition of beauty borrowed from a filmmaker’s aphorism: beauty can contain ugliness so long as it contains truth. The phrase, carried in Argentine media, neatly encapsulates the challenge facing a sequel that must balance glamour with cultural accountability.

As the 29 April opening nears, the film’s trajectory will depend on whether it can translate affection for its predecessor into a narrative that resonates across borders without stumbling over the new red lines of global discourse. The backlash in China is still evolving, and Disney’s response — or silence — will be scrutinised by analysts in multiple capitals. For a Hollywood machine that increasingly relies on international receipts, the episode is a reminder that even a celebrated wardrobe cannot cloak the complexities of a splintering media world. The Devil Wears Prada 2 may well succeed, but not without first standing uncomfortably in the anteroom of a public audit.