“This... ‘AM stuff’? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your factory and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy billet of aluminium, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to put a novel technology on your manufacturing floor. But what you don’t know is that AM is not just plastics, it’s not trinkets, it’s not just filament extrusion, it’s actually much more complex…”
I’m certainly not the only editor to come away from the recent The Devil Wears Prada 2 movie with a lot of feelings. Nor am I the first person to butcher its famous Cerulean blue monologue.
The original The Devil Wears Prada is a tale of chauffeured cars and Chanel boots. It revolves around Vogue-like magazine Runway, and the mid-00s trope of a young journalist as the hero. Yet, despite its romanticised editorial backdrop, it is very much a fashion industry movie.
The sequel, however, is a magazine industry movie. And, as an editor, hiding behind my popcorn during advertorial negotiation scenes like a bad horror movie, it’s brutally real – designer wardrobes and fancy Italian hotel suites aside.
We relaunched TCT in November as a global, flagship, paper of record for the AM industry. As one of our TCT Advisors remarked: the Vogue – or Runway – of AM. In this issue alone we’ve been through the doors at Audi, The Exploration Company and Batch.Works, and sat down with NASA and bio clinicians. You won’t find a cut up press release or unwarranted superlative on any of our pages.
The film comments on how audiences today consume content – scrolling social media, absorbing little more than headlines shouted in large fonts. We’re all slaves to the algorithm, afterall. There’s a scene where Anne Hathaway’s character has one of her articles ‘go viral’. Sure, people saw it, but ‘How many actually read it?’, the film asks. I’d rather not know the answer.
So, you’d think I’d be feeling down on print. Quite the opposite. It emboldened my belief in its unique offering. Print is curated, intentional. And in AM, after years of misinformation, we can’t really rely on just the headlines.
You might be reading this because you’re already a subscriber and know this to be true. Maybe you picked this issue up at TCT 3Sixty. If so, you might consider joining us as an Executive Member. We promise to keep cutting through the noise, bringing you the insights you need and those you didn’t even realise you did.
As Runway’s icy editor Miranda Priestly would sign off...
“That’s all.”
