Not quite right

Fashionistas deplore the couture in The Devil Wears Prada.

"Where is the chic?" groused David Wolfe, a New York fashion and retail consultant well versed in the eccentricities of real-life magazine divas. In his assessment, the film's stylistic problems begin with Meryl Streep as the silver-coiffed Miranda, a character he thinks looks far too bland and bankerlike and ugh! — far too pretty — to be convincing as Runway's chilly commander in chief.

In fashion, "You've gotta have a gimmick, like the stripper said," Mr. Wolfe observed. Think, he urged, of the rigidly stylized signature look of magazine legends like Diana Vreeland, with her kabuki makeup and tar-colored hair, or celebrity editors like Anna Wintour, whose dark glasses and precision-cut bangs shield a profile of cut glass.

"In a world of 'fabulous,' " Mr. Wolfe pronounced, " 'pretty' just isn't good enough."