In December 2025, a young Indian model from Hyderabad opened a Chanel show in a decommissioned New York subway station, wearing a quarter-zip sweater and washed denim. The previous year, a Chanel scout had spotted her on a subway platform, and the house decided that the platform would be her origin story. Five months later, on the fourth of May 2026, the same model walked the Met Gala carpet in silk muslin trousers printed by trompe-l'œil to look like blue jeans. Two hundred and fifty hours of couture, the brand later explained, in defence of what every viewer saw at first glance: a girl on the biggest fashion night of the year, dressed in what looked like jeans, while Nicole Kidman swept past her in red sequins.

We began writing this piece in Revere, the working-class strip north of Boston, where the city has quietly settled its Spanish-speaking and Muslim arrivals. The playground was alive: Salvadoran grandmothers, Moroccan mothers, a small republic of children. There was a real community among the Spanish-speakers, the kind we rarely see in Anglophone America. The young girls in hijab there sent us toward a different but related question about inscribed dress, which we developed for our weblog, Brown Pundits. What follows here is the other half of the same week's thinking: who decides what is worn, by whom, and on which carpet.

The theme of the Met Gala this year was Fashion is Art. The accompanying exhibition is called Costume Art, which is the historical name of the institution: the Museum of Costume Art merged into The Met in 1946 and became the Costume Institute. The curator-in-charge Andrew Bolton's thesis for the show is that the dressed body is the constant across the museum's five thousand years of objects. Clothing, he says, mediates identity and is never neutral.

Chanel did not violate the brief. They obeyed it. They took Bolton's premise at its word: clothing is identity. So they wrote one for Bhavitha Mandava and dressed her in it. The 250 hours of handwork in the muslin become the alibi. The interiority of the gesture, the story of the subway, the full-circle moment, all of this is sold to the press as the deeper reading. The deeper reading is that someone else held the pen.

Look at the two pictures above. On the poster for The Devil Wears Prada 2, Meryl Streep stands centre in a saturated red gown, Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt arranged in cream and burgundy at her flanks, Stanley Tucci seated below in black. Red is sovereignty. Red is reserved for the woman whose office decides what gets worn. On the Met carpet, Bhavitha Mandava wears beige and grey. Saturation, in the visual grammar of power, is something the house dispenses to the figure it has already decided is central.

What happened to Bhavitha Mandava on the fourth of May was a rite of passage. It is the same rite Kubrick filmed in Eyes Wide Shut: the initiate walks into the masked court, undergoes the attack, and is from that point forward an insider. Mandava's attack was the press cycle. The accusations of racism, the comparisons to Kidman, the Diet Prada repost, the days of being the face of the discourse: all of this was the entry fee. She got more attention for the muslin denim than a Sabyasachi gown would have given her, and Chanel knew that. The humiliation was the door. This is how power tests its new courtiers. It does not invite them. It traumatises them in. The mask comes on, and never quite comes off.

Notice that the same Chanel walked Awar Odhiang, another house model and a Black woman, down the same carpet that night in a hand-beaded fringe dress that took all the trouble Mandava's look refused. The structure did not single out Chanel's models of colour as a class. It singled out Mandava as a body. The house had decided which figure would carry the conceptual gesture, and it was the one whose origin story was already a story Chanel had told. The assignment is not racial. It is editorial.

We have been reading fantasy novels this season for Fantasy Book Club. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh was the best of them. It is set in a magic boarding school, written not from the dormitory but from the staff room. Its protagonist is the Director of Magic, a bisexual woman in her late thirties, watching her school board prepare to scapegoat a scholarship student. The conflict of the book is that she is the institution's most competent functionary. She entered Chetwood as the brilliant outsider, and the school absorbed her. Workaholism is the redemption that absolves. The radical who works the hardest is no longer a radical; she has earned the school's trust by signing the risk assessment forms with the same fierce dedication she once brought to refusing them. Tesh's deeper move is that the absorbed protagonist still requires the brilliant scholarship student to see clearly. Proximity to power dulls the eye. The marginal retain the gift of recognising what the institution cannot, and the apparatus, even at its most competent, knows it cannot see without them.

The interesting thing about Devil Wears Prada 2, twenty years after the original, is that the magazine has lost ground. Print is dying. Andy Sachs, who two decades ago walked out of Runway, is now a respected reporter whose newsroom is laid off by text message during an awards gala. Miranda Priestly is fighting for her relevance after failing to vet a puff piece on a brand built on sweatshop labour. The film's premise is that Miranda hires Andy back against her own preference, because Irv Ravitz needs the magazine to look respectable again. Power calls on the margin when it needs the margin's legitimacy. The margin pays the entry fee in self-erasure. Miranda is glamorised in the new film not despite her cruelty but because of the work. The audience is invited to admire what one has to become to stay near the throne.

The same template applies to dead men. Michael, the Antoine Fuqua biopic released ten days ago, cost one hundred and fifty-five million dollars and earned five hundred and eighty-one million worldwide on the back of an estate-approved screenplay. The film is, in its way, subversive. By refusing to engage the allegations on the press's terms, it returns the singer to the public as mythology rather than dossier. We do not pretend to settle that question here. The structural claim of the film, and of the estate, is that the volume of the labour, the genius of the work, the contribution to global culture, redeem whatever else was in the room. Talent plus graft equals absolution. This is the same argument the Devil Wears Prada franchise makes about Miranda, and the same argument The Incandescent makes about Walden. Each case differs. The template does not. The question worth asking is whether productivity, the cardinal virtue of modern capitalism since Adam Smith built an ethic on it, is a Christian doctrine or a Satanic one.

This is the meditation. Power radiates as a template, not as a transfer. Those who reach for it are pulled in. It is dispensed, on conditions, to figures the centre has chosen as evidence of its own enlightenment. The recipient is offered a costume, a story, and a carpet, in exchange for the agreement to be the costume, to tell the story, to walk the carpet. The trauma of acquisition converts the recipient into the apparatus. Andy becomes Miranda. Mandava thanks Blazy. The radical writer accepts the prize. The genius dies and lets the estate decide what is said about him.

The proximate move toward the centre. The centre does not move. Devil Wears Prada is about a woman, but Miranda Priestly works for Irv Ravitz, who owns Elias-Clarke. Vogue runs the Met Gala, but Condé Nast is owned by the Newhouse family of Advance Publications. Chanel is owned by Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, brothers, fourth-generation, French. The Michael Jackson estate is administered by John Branca, the singer's attorney from 1980, and John McClain. Capital persists through institutions while symbolic faces rotate. The throne is structural, not personal. It is held, in any given decade, by those for whom it was built: the generational owners of the houses, the families behind the masthead, the executors of the estate. That those owners happen to be men of generational wealth is the corollary, not the thesis. White women, minoritized men, brown ambassadors, and the rest of the proximate groups now in visibility are the contemporary face of capital. The face changes. The institution does not. Mandava has joined the apparatus. The script that wrote her in was written by people whose names will not appear next to hers in the press for the look.

The old name for the apparatus is Mammon. The Devil's offer in the wilderness was the same offer Chanel made Mandava, that Runway made Andy, that Chetwood made Walden, that the estate made the dead singer. All of this can be yours. All you have to do is work for it. The Devil's mantra is not "sin." It is "work hard enough, and you will be forgiven." Productivity is the modern liturgy and the modern absolution. The Devil wears whatever this season requires. 20 years ago the Devil wore Prada. This season the Devil wears Chanel.

For the companion piece written the same week, see The Veil We Will Not Wear at Brown Pundits.

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