Karly

Mild spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada 2

Last Wednesday I went to see The Devil Wears Prada 2, and I feel like I probably have not talked about this enough, or at least not in the way it deserves, because my relationship to this film goes way back to when it first came out, when I was merely a child. I remember my mother had arranged to meet with one of her friends and her daughter, who was my friend, and I did not want to watch the film they had chosen, but little did I know it would become something of a hyperfixation and, in some way, dictate my future.

I remember wanting to be like Miranda, not in the tyrannical sense, although I do remember finding her a bit scary, which was, I suppose, natural for an impressionable eight year old, but in the sense that it made me want to run my own magazine, because magazines, at least to me then, seemed like the most fun thing in the world.

Watching the sequel twenty years later was obviously joyous, despite the AC at the cinema being so high I briefly thought I might trigger a trigeminal neuralgia flare up, which was not something I concerned myself with at eight, but it also raises very real and valid questions about publications now, about metrics becoming the most important thing, about the need to keep up with trends, about how being digital is no longer an alternative but almost a requirement for relevance.

I left the cinema thinking, not for the first time, that publications have a way of lingering in the mind long after the story itself has ended, and perhaps that is the real legacy of The Devil Wears Prada, not the clothes or the one liners or even Miranda herself, but the quiet insistence that being close to a publication, shaping it, curating it, deciding what is worthy of attention and what is not, still feels like one of the most seductive forms of power there is.

There is something about print in particular that haunts me, not only the weight of it but the thought of holding something you created in your hands, or seeing it in other people’s hands, being annotated, folded, left on a bedside table, refusing to succumb to the logic of fading trends. I would be a liar if I said I have never imagined Nonsense & Lit living such a life, bound and physical, non-algorithm dependent, something you could pick up at your favourite coffee shop or magazine stand.

And yet, Nonsense & Lit was born digital, not as a compromise but as a beginning, because it is meant to be immediate, accessible and borderless in a way that print has never quite managed to be. It is not something people should have to worry about shipping, or whether it might get lost, or even if it will be worth paying for. Everything on this website exists because we wanted to share what little we know about certain topics and hoped someone might find it interesting, and of course, Nonsense & Lit exists, at least in part, to allow me to live my Miranda Priestly fantasy, I cannot lie about that either.

It’s funny how things turn out, actually, because this started as a blog, something casual, I even called it a silly blog, it felt safe, deliberately small. Then at some point during our interview, Allie Esiri called it a magazine, very casually, as if that was simply what it was, and I remember having a brief, slightly absurd thought of oh, I am Miranda now, before eventually settling on calling it a publication myself, which felt, if not more official, then at least more honest.

Running a publication, even a small independent one, is rarely what people think it is. It is not just writing, it is the constant negotiation between ideas and execution, between wanting to create something thoughtful and having to actually format it, publish it, promote it, follow up on messages, chase replies that may never come, coordinate interviews, edit drafts, make decisions no one else sees, all of it happening quietly, without the structure or support that more established publications take for granted, and there is something strangely intimate about that, the way every piece carries traces of effort that will never be visible to the reader.

There is also, and this is the part that is harder to articulate without sounding either bitter or naive, the reality that when something is freely accessible, people begin to assume that everything behind it is freely given as well, not just the writing itself, but the time, the effort, the coordination, the quiet work that makes it possible in the first place.

And I think independent publications exist in a slightly ambiguous space because of that, somewhere between a passion project and something more structured, which means people are often happy to engage with them without necessarily recognising the extent to which they rely on a kind of mutual respect that is not always explicitly stated.

There have been moments where this has felt slightly unbalanced, where people are willing to take from something in ways that feel meaningful to them, whether that is visibility or space or attention, but not always as willing to give something back, even in the smallest sense, and I do not think this is always intentional, but it is something that becomes difficult to ignore once you start noticing it.

Which, I think, is what makes the question of access and sustainability much more complicated than it initially appears, because the decision to keep something open, to make it freely available, is not just an ethical one, it is also a practical one, and it comes with its own set of consequences that are not always immediately visible.

And this is where the idea of print becomes more complicated than I would like it to be, because it is not just about aesthetics or even legitimacy, although those things are undeniably part of it, it’s about permanence, about creating something that does not disappear with an algorithm change, about having something that exists outside the constant demand to be visible in order to be seen.

But print costs money, and money introduces a boundary, and I have never wanted to build something that someone might feel excluded from simply because they cannot afford it, especially when the entire point of Nonsense & Lit has been to make things available without that barrier, and so the question is not simply whether I want a print version, because I do, but what it would mean to create one without undoing the very thing that made it what it is.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about access, about keeping things open, about refusing to turn something I love into something someone else cannot reach, but I would be lying if I said I did not understand what Miranda meant when she said that everybody wants this, because I do too, just not exactly in the way she had it.

I don’t want the hierarchy, or the particular kind of fear she inspires, but I do understand the pull of being the person who decides what is worth paying attention to, the quiet authority of shaping a conversation, of building something people return to not because they have to, but because they want to.

And if I am being completely honest, which I think I have tried to be throughout this, I do want her office, I really do, although at the moment I am still in the process of remodelling mine.

Maybe in twenty years Nonsense & Lit will be at the scale of Runway, although I suspect I will still be calling it something slightly smaller out of habit. If The Devil Wears Prada 2 left me with anything, it is the sense that journalism, even now, is something that has to be chosen, again and again, by the people who care enough to keep it going, because without the arts, and without the words we use to make sense of them, I am not entirely sure where that leaves us.