Why Anne-Hathaway's toe ring in the The Devil Wears Prada is the ultimate expression of style

I'm aware that being confronted by a giant toe is most definitely going against the de rigeur custom nowadays of basically never mentioning anything about anyone's feet ever. But I watched The Devil Wears Prada a few months ago and one scene that particularly struck me was this slow camera pan over Anne Hathaway's bedsheeted body after a night of love-making with the dishy Simon Baker.

By this point in the film, Andrea is certifiably stylish, as noted by the absolute paragon of style herself and narrative foil to Andrea, Miranda Priestley. Andrea assimilated quite quickly in the film; once the point in the movie where Andrea commits to dressing impressively stylishly has come, she never again is seen to go back to her old ways of frumpy jumpers and messily tied back hair. There is something that simply clicked ON and from that point forth it is as if she saw herself, naked in the Garden of Eden, and became all at once too self-aware to ever don a garish garment again.

And it is that aspect of it that I personally find most interesting: the constancy of it. The rocksteady nature of what it means to be this adjective. I think that in order to be truly stylish, one must take being stylish from the exterior world, into the interior. You have to be ready to present yourself for inspection at all times. And then the film shows us this toe-ring. As if to say that we can no longer see Andrea at her most vulnerable, we are rebuffed: "I am not naked, for I have chosen my appearance deliberately." I think my reading of it implies that there is a distance now between Andrea's inner most world and us. We should be seeing into her life, but is she really being her true self? I am wondering about whether it is meant to be empowering or not that her transformation is complete. It almost feels as if she can never return to being completely 'naked' again. Narratively, this is also the turning point in the film. Where the fashion world is shown to be a political realm of backstabbing and nefarious machinations. Just as the character is in as far as they thought they could go, that world seeks to take even more of her humanity, not just changing her appearance, but now subtly attacking her values as a person. I do think that whether they knew it or not, it was an incredibly well demarcated turning point in the film. The transformation is complete, she has leveled up and attracted a rich, successful man, carving herself a place in the world of fashion and finishing her struggle as an outsider, only for the film to reveal how much of an outsider she still really is. That fashion and this world is not truly about glamour, but about all too real human egos.

And I just couldn't tell you how much deliberation there might have actually been about this toe-ring, but I just feel like, to be honest, it really is stylish. There is a sprezzatura to it, a single loop, and that is a very hard thing to capture. That Andrea fought to be accepted on her own merits, until she achieved unconscious competence, stylish now no matter where.

In my own life, I have felt a similar feeling. There is not some person 'deep down' but we are in fact just what we do. To be stylish you must be stylish all the time. Because life is unpredictable. You cannot always be prepared. You will get caught out, you will be seen naked. There is an analogy in this to me of the luck endemic to success. Although you need luck to be successful, you will actually, whether you know it or not, constantly be offered opportunities to take advantage of in life, and the only way to best do so is to be always prepared.