Amari Almost Had A CBK-Inspired Wardrobe In The Devil Wears Prada 2

Simone Ashley’s Amari is officially the scene-stealer of The Devil Wears Prada 2. The first assistant’s it-girl composure and effortlessly chic ’fits stick with you long after the movie ends. (Amari spinoff when?) Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that her enviable style pulled inspiration from one of the New York fashion world’s most enduring muses: Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

As the film’s costume designer, Molly Rogers, tells Bustle, she pitched CBK as a reference early on, citing the late Calvin Klein publicist’s “really sleek and clean” look as a kind of timeless uniform. “Because she’s always either going to be right behind Miranda or right next to her, and I didn’t want anything pulling focus,” Rogers says.

However, the ultra-minimalist route wasn’t quite a fit for Runway’s resident trendsetter. As Rogers explains: “It was boring on her, she’s young, she’s beautiful. And I was like, ‘This isn’t working for me. I think I’m wrong.’”

The costume designer — who previously won an Emmy for her work on Sex and the City — reversed course, pulling “younger and fun” pieces from labels like Monse and Thom Browne.

“She’s just legs,” Rogers notes of Ashley’s statuesque beauty, “and it just needed to have some injection of energy. And I’m glad that [director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna] allowed me to explore what my knee-jerk reaction was, which was just real clean Americana. And I’m glad we had the time to pivot.”

While Amari may not have sported CBK’s go-to pieces — think polished button-ups, jeans, pencil skirts — in the end, she absolutely channeled the style icon’s sophisticated essence. As Ashley previously told Bustle: “She’s very confident and knows what she’s doing, and has such an educated opinion in her workspace. [McKenna] and I were like, ‘She’s that it-girl in the office.’ I think we wanted to create a character that was slightly mysterious, but also inspirational.”

Speaking of mystery, Rogers doesn’t want you to think too hard about how Amari cultivated that fabulous wardrobe.

“We never had a meeting about her. I was hoping that people would watch the movie and not try to analyze it like that, that they would just go in,” she says. “The anticipation was so high that they would just go in and enjoy what they were watching instead of having their calculator and trying to make it make sense, just suspend belief.”