The devil wears sellout

Total sellout

The new sequel to ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ finds heroine Andy ditching her moral compass to live the life of a social-climbing material girl

The heroine of this summer’s hot beach read runs a high-end, celebrity-obsessed weddings magazine. She’s getting hitched to one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, a sexy businessman from an old-money family. And it looks like a baby may be in her future!

All par for the course, chick-lit-wise. Except the bride-to-be is Andrea “Andy” Sachs, scrappy heroine of Lauren Weisberger’s 2003 novel “The Devil Wears Prada,” last seen telling Miranda Priestly (a thinly veiled Anna Wintour) to go f - - k herself, ditching her designer duds and opting for a non-glitzy life as a serious writer.

Andy of “The Devil Wears Prada” now embraces the lavish lifestyle rejected by Anne Hathaway in the 2006 film.

Which has us wondering: Has Andy Sachs sold out?

“Revenge Wears Prada,” out June 4, will find no shortage of readers eager to catch up with all their favorite characters a decade later: Evil assistant Emily, bitchy art director Nigel and, of course, Miranda Priestly all return in Weisberger’s new book.

In 2013, we catch up with Andy in the bridal suite at the exclusive upstate Astor Courts Estate, where she’s shortly to be married to her handsome prince — who also happens to be a principal investor in her glossy upscale magazine, The Plunge.

Sure, everyone likes a success story. But the appeal of Weisberger’s protagonist in the first book — a roman à clef, so really, the author herself — was her role as a plucky Everywoman dropped into the baffling, pretentious world of high fashion and New York media elite.

Drawn from Weisberger’s own yearlong tenure as assistant to Vogue editrix Wintour, the book saw Andy suffering the trials and tribulations of working for the tyrannical, demanding editor of Runway, the world’s top fashion magazine. Eventually rising to the occasion — and absorbing some style savvy along the way — Andy uses the experience as a training ground, but ultimately rejects Miranda and Emily’s world as empty and soulless.

Anne Hathaway brought the character to life in the 2006 movie, starring along with Meryl Streep as Miranda, Emily Blunt as Emily and Adrian Grenier as her long-suffering boyfriend Nate (Alex, in the book), a non-glamorous chef who always urged her to be true to herself.

Toward the end of the film, Andy admits to him that “I turned my back on everything I believed in, and for what?”

“For shoes,” Nate says.

Afterward, we see her taking a job at the dingy offices of the New York Mirror, a paper that takes a shine to her article on janitor unions — and is as far from Runway as one could possibly get.

“The Devil Wears Prada” might have been literary fluff, but in Andy Sachs it gave young, professional women an admirable role model, someone who entered the maw of Manhattan’s opulently wealthy high-fashion industry, came out stronger for it and chose to go squarely in the other direction.