From Gaga & Madonna to Breakout Stars: Music Supervisor Julia Michels on Crafting “The Devil Wears Prada 2” Sound

Even veteran music supervisors can be stumped.

When I ask Julia Michels what song she would choose to capture her experience as the music supervisor for The Devil Wears Prada 2, her eyes go slightly wide in mild surprise. “Oh, my gosh!” she says. She needs time to think about it.

A few days later, the answer comes back via email: “Michael Jackson – Working Day and Night. This describes the fact that I literally worked seven days a week (morning, day, and night) on this movie for a year!”

Michels’ email illustrates her friendly, open vibe, her exuberance about her job, and a teensy weensy bit of the pressure she was under to deliver a great soundtrack for the sequel to the beloved The Devil Wears Prada.

“The expectation that it is going to be as good or better [than the original] is something that is always weighing on my mind,” she says.

The release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, twenty years after the first installment, is, obviously, a big deal. The original Devil told the story of recent college grad Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) desperately trying to keep her job as an assistant to high priestess of fashion Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep) at Runway magazine, set against the backdrop of high-flying pre-recession New York City. It captured the imagination of untold numbers of Millennials and a lot of the rest of us. 

The 2006 film was a very big deal for Michels, too, though in a different way. Obsessed with the book, she fought for the job as its music supervisor. It changed her life. “That movie really put me on the map,” she told the podcast Stereophonic.

Watch the iconic first five minutes of The Devil Wears Prada, and it’s clear why. The film opens with a montage of intimidatingly glamorous young women getting dressed for work, intercut with unemployed Andy’s decidedly humbler morning routine. In a stroke of genius, Michels selected KT Tunstall’s rollicking “Suddenly I See” to score the sequence, the chorus of which hints at Andy’s transformational journey to come. Today, the song has 570 million streams on Spotify.

Since her career-making below-the-line star turn, Michels has gone on to music-supervise a slew of commercially and critically successful films, including the blockbuster Pitch Perfect series and 2018’s A Star is Born, for which she snagged a Grammy Award. 

To tackle The Devil Wears Prada 2, Michels had to reckon with a changing musical landscape for major Hollywood movies.

“The Devil Wears Prada movie and soundtrack did not have any new music. It was all existing music,” she says. “Somehow, the combination of the story, visuals, characters, fashion, and music made this iconic film. Twenty years later, the trend is to have all new music, like a Barbie or an F1. That’s not what we were looking to create. We were still looking to do something very organic.”

Something pretty organic – and pretty Hollywood– happened such that The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack did end up with three new songs from superstar Lady Gaga. Initially, director David Frankel only knew that he wanted a pop star for a cameo and a runway performance in the film. Meryl Streep made a personal call to Lady Gaga, who unexpectedly ended up not only performing in the film but also as one of Michels’ collaborators.

Michels lights up at the mention of Gaga. (She tells me optimistically, “If you ever get to work with Lady Gaga, it’s one of the best experiences ever.”)

“We let her in on every process. We got her approval on things. We showed her films early. We wanted her to feel very collaborative. Sometimes artists feel a little bit left out of the process. They send in a song, they go to the premiere, and that’s it. We kept her involved, and I think she respected that…we got a great result because David let her into his process,” Michels says. Two of Gaga’s songs – “Shape of a Woman” and “Glamorous Life”- embody the sometimes-dark grandiosity of fashion and its obsessive acolytes; a third, “RUNWAY” (with Doechii), serves up fun grandiosity. “I can turn a dance floor into a runway,” they boast.

Throughout the music supervision process, Michels followed one North Star, in the form of a question: Does this sound Prada? “Classiness and sophistication are what I mean when I say Prada,” she explains. “We were looking for classy music rather than big pop sparkle. Some of the younger pop artists [of today] would have made our movie sound too young … The characters are not in their 20s anymore.”

Grammy-wining R&B/soul songstress Ledisi’s smooth and sexy “Daydreaming,” for example, is from her 2025 album The Crown. That song scores a scene in which Andy seeks advice from her pal Lily (Tracie Thomas) while in Lily’s softly lit, tastefully decorated loft. “What would she be listening to? Lily is an art dealer. ‘Daydreaming’ is current, sophisticated,” says Michels. That tone “held scenes, rather than disappeared. They had a part in the story.” 

Much of Prada 2’s upscale sound comes from British or British-influenced female pop vocalists who have revived and glossed the retro-soul vibe Amy Winehouse pioneered with her breakout single “Rehab” (coincidentally released the same year as The Devil Wears Prada).

“What’s coming out of the British sound right now – the Olivia Deans, the Sienna Spiros … it just works with the modern sound that we were looking for,” Michels says.

Those tracks include Raye’s buoyant “Worth It” from her smash 2023 album My 21st Century Blues, Olivia Dean’s “Nice to Each Other” from 2025’s The Art of Loving, Siena Spiro’s “Material Lover” and “Evergreen Avenue” by newcomer Izzy Escobar, who is actually from Massachusetts. Michels thought she was British.

Those last two songs are sleeper originals – commissioned by Michels and written nearly on-the-spot by their precocious authors. Since the album’s release, Spiro in particular has risen to the fore. The song came about when Michels and the Prada 2 team needed the right music for a scene depicting the birthday of Runway’s 75-year-old publisher, Irv (Tibor Feldman).

They tried 1960s jazz, but, says Michels, “it just sounded old, and it didn’t sound Prada.” Instead, they showed the scene to Spiro, who wrote the buoyant but restrained retro-soul track “Material Lover” in just a few days. “It launches you into the party and plays for a long time, and now it’s become sort of a breakout hit,” Michels says with satisfaction.

There’s only one song from the original Devil that, despite being nearly a golden oldie, still sounds Prada and made it into the sequel. Madonna’s “Vogue,” which went to No. 1 way back in 1990. (Fun fact: “Vogue” itself was first released as part of the quasi-soundtrack for Dick Tracy.)

In the 2006 film, the song scores another classic fashion-montage moment, as a newly glammed-up Andy navigates New York City traffic in a series of chic outfits. Fans might be surprised to learn that Michels and company didn’t plan to include the iconic track in the sequel.

“That was a discussion – are we keeping ‘Vogue’ in or are we not? … Truth be told, we wanted to see if we could better it. We tried, and because the marketing is also so tied to ‘Vogue,’ I think people expected it to be in the film, and at the end of the day, we were like, Why are we trying to change something that’s working? It’s in a similar montage; it’s a nice callback. At the end of the day, we’re like, ‘It’s perfect, we’re keeping it,’” she says with a laugh.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is in theaters now. 

Featured image: (L-R) Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, and Stanley Tucci as Nigel Kipling in 20th Century Studios’ THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2. Photo by Macall Polay. © 2026 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.