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The heroine of this summer’s hot beach read runs a high-end, celebrity-obsessed weddings magazine. She’s getting hitched to one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, a sexy businessman from an old-money family. And it looks like a baby may be in her future!
All par for the course, chick-lit-wise. Except the bride-to-be is Andrea “Andy” Sachs, scrappy heroine of Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel “The Devil Wears Prada,” last seen telling Miranda Priestly (a thinly veiled Anna Wintour) to go f - - k herself, ditching her designer duds and opting for a non-glitzy life as a serious writer.
Which has us wondering: Has Andy Sachs sold out?
“Revenge Wears Prada,” out June 4, will find no shortage of readers eager to catch up with all their favorite characters a decade later: Evil assistant Emily, bitchy art director Nigel and, of course, Miranda Priestly all return in Weisberger’s new book.
In 2013, we catch up with Andy in the bridal suite at the exclusive upstate Astor Courts Estate, where she’s shortly to be married to her handsome prince — who also happens to be a principal investor in her glossy upscale magazine, The Plunge.
Sure, everyone likes a success story. But the appeal of Weisberger’s protagonist in the first book — a roman à clef, so really, the author herself — was her role as a plucky Everywoman dropped into the baffling, pretentious world of high fashion and New York media elite.
Drawn from Weisberger’s own yearlong tenure as assistant to Vogue editrix Wintour, the book saw Andy suffering the trials and tribulations of working for the tyrannical, demanding editor of Runway, the world’s top fashion magazine. Eventually rising to the occasion — and absorbing some style savvy along the way — Andy uses the experience as a training ground, but ultimately rejects Miranda and Emily’s world as empty and soulless.
Anne Hathaway brought the character to life in the 2006 movie, starring along with Meryl Streep as Miranda, Emily Blunt as Emily and Adrian Grenier as her long-suffering boyfriend Nate (Alex, in the book), a non-glamorous chef who always urged her to be true to herself.
Toward the end of the film, Andy admits to him that “I turned my back on everything I believed in, and for what?”
“For shoes,” Nate says.
Afterward, we see her taking a job at the dingy offices of the New York Mirror, a paper that takes a shine to her article on janitor unions — and is as far from Runway as one could possibly get.
“The Devil Wears Prada” might have been literary fluff, but in Andy Sachs it gave young, professional women an admirable role model, someone who entered the maw of Manhattan’s opulently wealthy high-fashion industry, came out stronger for it and chose to go squarely in the other direction.
Ten years later, Andy has evolved into a media maven who gladly accepts free trips and gifts, like the luxury massage paid for by an A-list celebrity whose nuptials she’s profiling: “Let The New Yorker writers be sticklers for journalistic integrity,” writes Weisberger. “[Andy] would get an afternoon of bliss.”
Andy also now has serious conversations like this with Emily:
“Look at these gorgeous buttons! This dress wasn’t inexpensive.”
“I don’t give a s - - t about the buttons!”
“It’s Michael Kors! Isn’t that worth something?”
“It’s Michael Kors beachwear, Andy.”
Weisberger defended Andy’s professional sea change to The Post, pointing out that she’s “had a whole bunch of years where she got more experience. And she realized that it’s not necessarily writing for The New Yorker that’s her ultimate dream. In this city, being published anywhere is amazing. It’s a tough place to work.”
Plus, says the author, she didn’t want Miranda to have successfully scared her protagonist away from magazines altogether. “I really thought a lot about wanting Andy to stay in the magazine world,” she says. “And the wedding stuff is a topic she’s interested in. She’s in a totally different place now, she’s at the top of her game.”
She has also risen in social strata with her new beau. Gone is Andy’s chef-boyfriend, now replaced with a fiancé she describes thusly:
“Max Harrison, long on the circuit of most eligible bachelors, a guy who’d dated the Tinsley Mortimers and Amanda Hearsts of New York City… was her betrothed. There would be mayors and moguls in attendance, just waiting to cheer on the young scion and his new bride.”
You can almost imagine the original Andy reading this and sticking her finger down her throat.
But Weisberger stands by Andy’s current guy. “I don’t think her ideals have changed,” she says. “I think she’s maybe less quick to rush to judgment. Maybe the younger Andy would have immediately discounted Max because of the money and the society and the impressive name, and not seen that he’s a really great guy who has the potential to be a great dad and happens to also be gorgeous and super fun. I think in that way she’s grown up.”
We’ll give Andy points for standing up for herself when Max wants her to change her name (she won’t) and for objecting to his society-dame mom’s insistence that she stop working and devote herself to charity work after they marry.
But surrounded as she is with luxe trappings, Hamptons vacations and diamond jewelry, it becomes increasingly hard to even recognize the Andy of the first book.
For the vast majority of this follow-up, Andy’s story is the kind of fairy tale that so many young women who come to Manhattan take to heart (and end up miserable because of): If I just play my cards right, I’ll meet a rich guy who’ll be my happily ever after, and to hell with all the nice ones who don’t make six-plus-figure salaries.
“Revenge” isn’t just a bad turn for Andy; it’s also behind the times. Where “Devil” echoed the shoe- and Mr. Big-centric “Sex and the City” years, this novel arrives in a “Girls”-era New York, one where young women are comfortable living their own messy, impoverished, mistake-ridden lives — with or without men involved, but certainly not looking to be rescued or defined by them.
The subplot involving Miranda Priestly, which feels somewhat grafted into the novel in order to justify its being called a sequel, sees The Runway editor attempting to purchase The Plunge and take over editorial control from her former minion. Stripped of the hint of emotional complexity in the first book, the character is now a straight-up villain who enables Andy to take her only strong moral stance: She won’t sell her magazine to the woman who made her life — and the lives of many young women before and after her — a living hell.
But given all the other developments, this feels like weak sauce. Andy’s part of the industry now — she just doesn’t want to be Miranda’s slave again.
At the very end of the novel, Weisberger does reveal a glimmer of hope for Andy, but for this reader, it’s too late. As conniving reporter Christian put it to Andy in the movie: “You, my friend, are crossing over to the dark side.”
sstewart@nypost.com