Between the new Westlife album and the return of The Devil Wears Prada, it feels like we’ve woken up in 2006 – so please be vigilant if anyone offers you a subprime mortgage or asks you to appear on The Russell Brand Show.

20 years on from the iconic original, The Devil Wears Prada 2 does provide some perspective on how much has changed. Widespread buy-in from the fashion world and improvements in workplace culture prevent it from being the industry critique we got from the first film – although this does provide the movie with much better clothes and removes the nastier elements, such as fat-shaming and J. K. Rowling. But the sequel does a decent job of addressing those changes, with jokes about Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) bullying being kept in check, acknowledging how that behaviour belongs in 2006 along with Alanis Morissette and Ellen DeGeneres.

This declawing does make the whole exercise seem rather pointless, and the story is the usual rehash you would expect from a sequel made two decades later. Andy (Anne Hathaway) has become a serious journalist (presumably for a less stressful life after being Priestly’s assistant), but because of some plot she ends up back at Runway with Miranda and Nigel (Stanley Tucci), and immediately crosses paths with her former colleague Emily (Emily Blunt) who now works at Dior and has remained committed to the same haircut and eye makeup for the last 20 years.

The movie updates its industry commentary with broad swipes at the magazine’s tech-bro owners and clickbait-chasing journalism, though these beats feel safe and unconvincing compared to the Anna Wintour-based specificity of its predecessor’s satire. But it’s the ageless characters that make the world worth revisiting, with Blunt, Tucci and Streep relishing their sharp looks and sharper one-liners. Everyone is nicer but no less funny this time around, and the characters are given room to grow – all apart from Andy who actually goes backwards, and gets a love story so perfunctory it makes her boyfriend troubles in the first film look like Hamnet.

It may lack the teeth of the original, but The Devil Wears Prada 2 is an enjoyable look at Runway with a functioning HR department – even though after all that sensitivity training they still only have ethnic minorities as barely visible friends or assistants to support and fetch coffee for the white people. Some things never change.