Lady Gaga and Doechii released the official music video for "Runway" Monday night ahead of The Devil Wears Prada 2's May 1 theatrical release. The song dropped April 10 and has been climbing the Billboard Hot 100 since (currently at #50, #5 on Hot Dance/Pop, with chart entries in Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK). Billboard has the full release context.
What landed last night is the actual cultural object. Parris Goebel directed it — the New Zealand choreographer-director who built Rihanna's Savage X Fenty shows into the most copied fashion-show format of the 2020s. The wardrobe leans on Viktor & Rolf and Gaurav Gupta couture. The choreography pulls from ballroom — Pose-era voguing, House of LaBeija staging, the entire grammar that mainstream pop has been borrowing from for thirty years and rarely crediting.
The Production Lineup Tells You Who This Is For
Read the credits and the strategic intent of the song itself comes into focus: Lady Gaga, Doechii, Bruno Mars, Andrew Watt, Cirkut, D'Mile, Dernst Emile II, Jayda Love. That is the production room that touched The Idol soundtrack, Cardi B's Am I the Drama?, and most of Bruno Mars's last six years of work. It is the dominant pop-and-R&B writing room of this era, and they were assembled here to do one thing: deliver the first commercially undeniable single of The Devil Wears Prada 2's rollout.
Sonically, "Runway" is a 1990s-house-and-ballroom hybrid layered over an '80s-inspired electronic beat — the Gaga thread that runs from "Born This Way" through Chromatica, retuned for a 2026 club ear. Gaga's own line — "you were born for the runway" — is the kind of self-quoting the catalog now allows her. Doechii brings the Tampa-via-Top Dawg verse that confirms why she was the right second voice: not just a rapper feature, but a co-author of the visual ethos.
Why This Is the Movie's Opening Argument
The Devil Wears Prada 2 walks into theaters Friday into a market that has shifted hard since 2006. Print fashion media is a fraction of what it was at the original's release. Anna Wintour's status at Condé Nast has been openly transitional for two years. The audience that grew up on Runway magazine and the assistant-as-aspirational-figure trope is now in their late thirties and forties, and the audience that did not is being re-introduced to it through TikTok edits.
The studio's decision to lead the soundtrack with Gaga + Doechii — rather than with anything from the actual film — is a tell. The single is the trailer. Goebel's video is the trailer for the trailer. The runway-as-metaphor framing recasts the original film's anxious workplace satire as a more affirmative, ballroom-coded celebration of self-presentation. That is not the same movie's pitch as 2006. It is the version of the franchise the studio thinks 2026 can actually sell.
Whether the film delivers on that pitch is Friday's question. The Lincoln Center premiere happened April 20; the carpet was livestreamed across Disney+ and Hulu, the first true post-pandemic fashion-and-media tentpole. Gaga makes a guest appearance in the film itself.
What to Watch Next
Three things to track over the next ten days: whether "Runway" cracks the Hot 100 top 10 on the back of the video; whether the Goebel-directed visual gets nominated for any awards (Goebel has been the consensus best choreographer-director in pop for five years and has yet to take a VMA Video of the Year); and whether the Gaga-Doechii duet shows up on the eventual Album of the Year conversation as the soundtrack's anchor or as a one-off promo single.
The video is on YouTube and the song is everywhere streaming. Watch "RUNWAY" on YouTube — it rewards the full screen, which is the whole point of how Goebel shoots.
Related on Uristocrat: Doechii's "Denial Is A River" video.
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