The film’s makeup department head, Nicki Ledermann, deploys the cat eye at a fraught moment for this liner look. Last month in The New York Times, journalist Jessica Roy wondered if the cat eye was glaringly dated, citing a popular TikTok in which a 29-year-old gets roasted for the look by her college-age sister. Of course, it’s easier to dismiss things as “over” than to admit they’re more complicated. That’s why skinny jeans are dunzo—in the age of Ozempic, there’s less need to create the illusion of an “ideal” body when you can needle it into submission. Ditto big feelings like heartbreak and yearning, both of which have been rebranded as “millennial cringe” online, even as our culture grapples with very real issues of romantic loneliness, family estrangement, and chosen community at what can feel like the end of the world.
If we consider the cat eye in the context of this cultural anxiety—the kind that makes us throw up our hands and say, “it’s over,” instead of “wait, something’s happening”—then Ledermann’s approach feels sharp. She uses the graphic flick to underscore the film’s most ambitious women within a franchise that’s fundamentally about how far you’ll go to succeed—and whether you, as a woman, have the “right” to enjoy it when you do.
In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the cat eye becomes a kind of girlboss signifier, which tracks when you look at the history of a great liquid wing. It began as a symbol of Egyptian royalty, as embodied by Queen Nefertiti and Cleopatra. (When Cleopatra adopted the look in 51 BC, it also aligned her with cats, which were worshipped as deities.) Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn wielded their femininity very differently, but both used black liquid liner to conquer Hollywood. On Shark Tank, Lori Greiner wears a cat eye while debating million-dollar startup valuations; on Gossip Girl, the achievement-obsessed Blair Waldorf schemes her way to Columbia with a similar flick. And of course, there’s Taylor Swift, one of the only songwriters ever to reach billionaire status, according to Forbes. Just this week, the 36-year-old appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in her signature black cat eye—a look she’s worn on nearly every album cover since 2006. (Okay, except 1989, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department, but that’s only because we can’t see her face.)
