Anne Hathaway chopped up her cerulean sweater for 'Prada 2' homage

Spoiler alert! We're discussing major details about the ending of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (in theaters now). Stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet and don’t want to know what happens.

It’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis – it’s actually cerulean.

Twenty years ago, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) and her lumpy blue sweater made cinematic history in “The Devil Wears Prada,” as the fashion-illiterate assistant was mercilessly dressed down by fearsome style maven Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep).

The oft-quoted monologue became instantly memorable for Streep’s tossed-off yet incisive delivery, as well as the expert way that Miranda calls out Andy for her willful ignorance of fashion trends and craftsmanship.

For costume designer Molly Rogers, it was imperative to pay subtle homage to the scene in “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” And so, in the final moments of the sequel, you may recognize that Andy is wearing a slightly updated version of the cerulean sweater as she works at the Runway magazine office late one night.

“The first phone call I made was to find out if it still exists,” Rogers says of the original garment. “It needed to be seen again, and I love that it’s the last thing you see. It’s full circle.”

As fans will notice, it’s actually more of a sweater vest in the sequel, which is all thanks to Hathaway. The sweater now has a deep V-neck with stylishly tattered edges, which Andy pairs with a button-down shirt and jeans.

“Annie scared us to death in the fitting room,” Rogers recalls. “She just took a pair of scissors and whack, whack, whack – she just chopped the sleeves off of it.”

Rogers had always planned to customize the sweater somewhat for the new movie, “to make it feel like it had been cherished all these years and seen some rough times,” the designer says. But Hathaway’s drastic rework made even more sense for the character of Andy.

“Her thread through the movie is feminine menswear, so this was a good place for a vest,” Rogers says. “It kind of put an exclamation point on that.”

The revamp of Andy’s sweater isn’t the only style Easter egg from the first movie. In the opening sequence of “Prada 2,” Andy walks by a street vendor in the park who is holding up two similarly shaded blue belts – a direct reference to the first movie’s cerulean scene, in which Runway editor Jocelyn (Rebecca Mader) puzzles over two analogous belts. (“They’re so different,” she frets.)

Rogers also makes a less-obvious reference to the cerulean scene with a Dries van Noten tassel jacket that Miranda wears to the office cafeteria in the sequel.

“If you're familiar with the first movie, when she does the cerulean soliloquy, Miranda is wearing this gold-coin bolero that is really ornate,” Rogers says. “This new tassel jacket was kind of the sister, or the bookend, to that jacket in the [original]. It felt like a good bridge – I went deep on that one!”

The first film’s most-memed accessory is undoubtedly the designer footwear that Andy wears to the office after her fashion makeover. (“Are you wearing …” “The Chanel boots? Yeah, I am.”) Miranda's new assistant, Amari (Simone Ashley), asks if she still has her Chanel wardrobe, but you won’t actually see the boots make an appearance in “Prada 2.”

“Some things are better left untouched,” Rogers says. “People were asking me, ‘Are you going to bring the Chanel thigh-high boots back for the second movie?’ But I felt like that should live alone in its time frame. That is so sacred to me in the first movie as a moment – I wouldn’t think you could do that justice by bringing it back for '2.' I really did not want to touch that.”