The Devil Wears Prada 2 opened on May 4 and pulled $233.6 million in its global debut, the second biggest opening of 2026 and the largest ever for both Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt. Within hours of the first screenings, the internet had locked onto a single image from the movie. Miranda Priestly, the icy editor of Runway, reimagined as a fast food worker. Caption: “Would you like some lies with that?” The shot appears early in the film, on a character’s phone, in a montage of memes that erupt after Runway gets caught publishing content praising a brand built on sweatshop labor.
The internet’s first reaction was completely predictable. AI slop. Lazy. Studio shortcut. The image had that softened-edge, slightly-undercooked quality everyone has learned to associate with diffusion models. Twitter started dunking. TikTok comments piled on. The same week the Met Gala launched a thousand filmstrip dress jokes, the discourse machine had a brand new villain: a fashion movie too cheap to commission a real artist.
Then the artist showed up.
An actual painter ruined a perfectly good outrage cycle
Alexis Franklin posted a time-lapse on Instagram. Brushstrokes, layers, a real human hand. “I got to paint this at the request of David Frankel for The Devil Wears Prada 2,” she wrote. “Absolutely no disrespect to Queen Meryl, but this is something I would’ve painted in my free time, so when they asked me to do this, it was nothing but fun.” Frankel, the director, had commissioned every meme in the film from human illustrators. The phones in the opening montage are full of hand-painted artwork. The film about taste and craftsmanship took a quiet, expensive stand against what one Yahoo headline called tasteless optimization in art direction.
Read that again. A fashion movie about a magazine that loses its soul to scandal hired flesh-and-blood painters to make its memes look like the kind of disposable trash that floods your feed. They paid an artist to imitate the visual language of free, instantly generated, infinitely replicable content. And then the audience accused them of skipping the artist.
The AI panic has overshot the actual AI
This is the part that should make everyone uncomfortable. We have trained ourselves to spot AI art using cues that are, demonstrably, just bad assumptions. Soft edges. Slight asymmetries. A vibe of “this person didn’t try very hard.” Those are not AI fingerprints. They are the fingerprints of fast illustrative work, the kind humans have been making for decades. Comic editorial sketches. Newspaper caricature. Franklin made the meme look like a meme. That was the whole point.
The reflex now is to treat any image with imperfect technique as suspect. The ordinary mess of human creativity gets routed through an “is this AI” filter before anyone asks “is this any good.” It is the visual equivalent of the panic when an AI startup stole the This Is Fine meme for a subway ad and the original artist had to lawyer up. Except this time, the artist did not get stolen from. She got accused of being the thief.
Why a fashion sequel cared enough to do this
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, plot-wise, a movie about a fashion magazine getting wrecked online. Runway publishes the wrong piece, a sweatshop scandal breaks, the meme storm follows, and Miranda has to navigate a public square that did not exist when the original 2006 movie came out. The film’s whole subject is the digital pile-on. So the production made a small, expensive philosophical move: every piece of internet shrapnel that hits Miranda in the movie was made by a person.
You can call this overkill. You can also call it the only honest way to make the movie. A film that critiques optimization-at-the-expense-of-craft cannot itself be a film that optimized away the craft. If you want to depict the meme economy on screen with any moral weight, you do not pull from a generator. You hire someone. The fact that nobody noticed until Franklin spoke up is the whole problem. We have already accepted, by default, that no one is on the other end of these images.
The history of meme attribution is a graveyard
Most memes are stolen from someone. The Chill Guy was a Phillip Banks drawing before it was a coin. The This Is Fine dog was a KC Green comic before it was a corporate ad. Every Drake-pointing template, every Distracted Boyfriend started as a real person doing a real thing. The internet’s default behavior is to launder authorship through enough reposts that the original creator becomes invisible. We have spent three decades flattening internet humor into something that feels ownerless, and now we are surprised when people assume nobody owns it.
Franklin’s meme is a small counter-move. It exists because a director paid for it. The credit is on Instagram. The time-lapse is documented. We got to see the full chain: artist commissioned, paid, named, art made, art used. That is what attribution looks like when it works. Without her Instagram post, the consensus would still be “ugh, AI.”
What this means for the next year of memes
The Great Meme Reset of 2026, which Gen Z teens have been chanting about since January, was always about wanting memes that felt human again. Less algorithmic. Less polished. Less “brainrot.” More dat boi, more rage comics, more visible mess. Franklin’s painting fits that nostalgia perfectly. Slightly off. Hand-finished. A real person mocking another real person on purpose.
The catch is that the audience has lost the ability to recognize “human and slightly off” as a feature. That recognition needs rebuilding, one credited illustrator at a time. Every time someone makes something genuinely strange or cheap-looking, the first comment will be “AI?” until we remember that strange and cheap were always part of the deal.
For now, Alexis Franklin gets the win. She painted a meme so convincingly meme-shaped that the internet refused to believe a person made it. That is a strange compliment, but it is a compliment. And it is the most genuinely interesting thing the Devil Wears Prada universe has produced since Anne Hathaway’s cerulean speech.
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Originally published on Pudgy Cat
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