Miu Miu (Q744)
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Italian fashion house
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Miu Miu |
Italian fashion house |
Statements
1993
designer
designer
2002
design director
“We’re in the endcore now.” That was the essay that popped up on my phone when I tapped the QR code on the front page of a newspaper sitting on my seat at the Miu Miu show. After a month of collections, it took a lot to grab my attention, but Endcore did it. The essay is the work of Shumon Basar, the British author of the 2021 bookThe Extreme Self. It asks questions about individuality—and the digitally influenced lack thereof—not unlike the ones Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were posing at the Prada show in Milan a couple of weeks ago.Endcore, Basar writes, is “a widespread feeling that things we once held onto as unchangeable, fundamental facts are now ending…. We feel like The End is approaching, like an asteroid is hurtling towards us; but it also strangely never seems to reach us. So we keep waiting. Endcore…is a verb, a predicament, a texture of the time we call the present. It’s an unnerving, queasy contemplation we have entered an ‘after’ era—but it’s not after one thing (like ‘modernity’), it’s after everything.”If you know anything about Miuccia Prada, you know that this kind of big thinking is a turn-on for her. And there was some big thinking going on here. The newspaper, which was said to be “envisaged” by the artist Goshka Macuga, featured dozens of QR codes, each linking to different texts. Prada rejected the idea that there were direct links between the art project and the collection, but for the sake of this review, let’s establish the endcore lexicon.To start, there are underthings worn as outer things, such as white cotton slips; some had graphic sequined embroideries. Sporty track separates and cutout bathing suits are also in the mix, along with private-school uniforms 1970s-ish geometric prints lifted from a spring 2005 collection (when life and the Miu Miu label were simpler propositions). It was a real mishmash of things that don’t belong together yet somehow work together. Western belts and waitress dresses? Vintage-look slips and sporty bikini tops? Yes and yes. With its what-the-hell irreverence, endcore reflects our moment’s anything-goes attitudes. And was that Hilary Swank and Willem Dafoe on the runway? Also yes.
1 October 2024
Let’s pretend for an impossible moment that we know nothing about Miuccia Prada, Miu Miu or the intellectual framework and history around them. In that state of innocence, it’s perfectly possible to look at this show and just mumble along happily to yourself: ‘Oh, nice long coats!Thoseare smart suits. What brilliant colors. Ah, it looks pencil skirts are back. Nice knitted cardigan jackets. Someone’s going to jump at those rose-printed dirndls. Those ’50s/’60s dresses—lovethem. And, what, wait, is that actually fur?’And so on. Because this collection was packed with great, wearable, straightforward, real, unmessed-about-with clothes (well, except for the ‘fur’ lookalikes, which were shearling). People representing a couple of generations were wearing them—cheery, for a change. And with that, it’s so very tempting to say, thank you, basta and goodnight! Because does thinking and talking about fashionalwayshave to feel like an intelligence test?Well, of course, we do know Mrs. Prada, and she has her iconographies, and despite observational intelligence being at a low ebb after 95 days of fashion shows, we must also give her complexities a whirl. Firstly, there was a video installation by Cécile B. Evans playing on various screens. The narrative, in abridged form, was about what happens to memories stored on devices after a digital apocalypse. A lone scientist-translator who may have been a sole survivor was tinkering with retrieving a woman’s memory. An old hand-held video camera floated across the scene like a lost spaceship at one point. It ended up with the woman’s brain apparently being downloaded into a digital hamster, with no human in sight.And then the screens faded to a desolate blizzard of static, just as they did two days and 20 shows ago at Balenciaga. Holding onto memories and treasuring what makes us human becomes more important than ever. That’s why it was hard not to see the elements of the collection as pages from Miuccia Prada’s Milanese autobiography. Her excellency re-cut memories of the five narrow, late ’60s, early ’70s double-breasted coats which opened the show. Then there were the askew strands of pearls; the discreet charm of the lady-suits (including a searingly good one in neon green); the fake minks, mimicking the real ones which used to be seen everywhere on the Via Montenapoleone in winter.
Also the maid’s white cotton uniform coat—or was it that of a seamstress?—worn on its own, or as another layer under a superb gray menswear wool three-button coat.And there were the baby clothes: tiny dresses or woolly cardigans worn with colorful ribbed tights. When Mrs. Prada came out at the end of the show, she had little to say, but it was to the point. “I think they are classics. Everyone can choose from them to be a child, or a lady. Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15-years-old, or a lady near death.”As for the connection with the video content she had commissioned from Evans, Mrs. Prada claimed it was pure creative coincidence. “I didn't know what she was doing. But when you’re interested in the contemporary world, different people in different fields are more or less working on the same things, like that.” Well, that’s a memory to store away.
5 March 2024
Bringing down the curtain on a confusing and emotionally fraught season, it took the great Miuccia Prada to give such a coherent, empathetic and confidence-building show for women, by a woman. Miu Miu was a brilliantly confirming run-through and remix of all the clothes we love, hoard, and rely on; the basic and the glittery, the sporty and the bonkers.The unconventional combinations of garments—apparently happy accidents of styling—were aimed, Prada communicated in a press release, at an “embracing of unique characters, the joy of life.” Her bespectacled Miu Miu characters in action were going about their business dealing with feeling everyday messy (yet also looking great); greasy hair, coats thrown over nighties, sloppy old unbuckled saddle shoes included. Some were lugging handbags stuffed with a change of footwear, as you do.It might also be the first time that neon sticking plasters have been used as ‘beauty’ devices on a runway—it takes a woman to know about summer sandal blisters, and make a joke about them.In a season when there’s been so much talk about the need for ‘real’ clothes, straight-up Miu Miu polo shirts, Oxford shirts, trench coats, and school uniform jackets were all present and correct—but then worn with Prada’s favorite underpants or funny short frilly techno-tutus topped with tracksuit drawstring waistbands.It wouldn’t be Prada without a political message. A video installation commissioned from Sophia Al-Maria played in the background throughout, showing stuntwoman Ayesha Hussain in fantasy super-hero modern-mythological mode, fiercely drawing a sword and aiming arrows from a bow. Well, yes, it has to be said: it is an unceasing battle out there for women in the world, and we all know it. Still, it’s good to see that a designer such as Miuccia Prada sort of has our backs—cocooned in a great big opera coat—if we so wish.
3 October 2023
What had the Miu Miu girl been up to? She walked down the raised white runway of Palais d’Iéna with confidence in her prim cardigan and oversized caban, all ladylike in kitten-heel sling-backs and a matching handbag diva-ishly draped over her arm. But wait a minute. Her hair was kind of messy, and her tights were pulled up over her top, and… was she sometimes not wearing pants? “I love it! If I were younger, I would go out in panties!” Miuccia Prada said after the show, bursting into laughter.After keeping it together through a season of subdued elegance and modest formality—the new official dressing decorum of the not-so-roaring 2020s—there were cracks in the polish as Miu Miu rang out a sombre month of shows to a frantic jazz soundtrack. Sure, all the courteous components were there: the humble muted color palette, the brave broad-shouldered tailoring, the polite jupe skirt and the played-down surface decoration. But this girl wasn’t fooling anyone.Elegance isn’t as easy as subscribing to a trend. Dressing and acting elegantly are inevitably something that comes with age, and try as they may, thankfully the younger generation whose mindset Miu Miu reflects and affects are still living life their own way. Prada wrapped that infectious sentiment of youth into a Miu Miu collection that read like a shopping list for the fall 2023 wardrobe. You’ll just have to look elsewhere for pants.With Brooklyn and Nicola Peltz-Beckham watching runway-side, the collection’s generational mentality was reflected by the special guests who walked the show: Emma Corrin, Amelia Grey Hamlin and Mia Goth; candid, open-hearted young people of their time who do things their own way. The message was reinforced by the genderless philosophy Prada has been introducing at Miu Miu by way of male casting (the men did bring trousers to the party).With its brilliant sense of humor, the Miu Miu collection uplifted its audience because it cut a contrast to a season that’s reflected a less uplifting reality. (That approach was certainly true for Prada’s mainline collection in Milan, which referenced the uniforms of the people who save the world: medicine, education, security.) With that in mind, the reduced Miu Miu silhouette and quiet colors also evoked a wartime sensibility.“A little serious,” Prada said. “I like to embrace that in this moment. Maybe I’m too careful about what’s happening around us, but I can’t leave fashion like some place of nonsense.
There’s some excitement and sexiness there,” she paused. “But basically, I think we have to dress for thinking. And for starting fresh.”
7 March 2023
Consider the first look in the Miu Miu collection a metaphor for what Miuccia Prada has been trying to tell us this season. A gray cap-sleeved T-shirt worn over a beige jumper worn over a gray long-sleeved T-shirt worn over a white T-shirt, they were all very ordinary garments. But styled this way, they didn’t look so normal at all. Two weeks ago in Milan, Prada showed a collection founded in simplicity as a reflection of a present-day simple-minded mentality that’s lost its sense of nuance. If it’s black or white or presented in clear lines, we’ll take it, buy it—vote for it—but the reality is almost always blurrier, grayer, and more layered than that.Miu Miu is the younger, funner counterpart to the Prada brand, but, as the designer said after today’s show, “I’m very serious but also fun. I am both.” That duality was reflected in a Miu Miu collection that wrapped up the same profound message of the Prada collection in more frivolous packaging. Continuing with the scanty silhouette that’s had her miniskirts and cropped sweaters flying off the shelves in recent seasons, Prada applied her analogy of simplicity to the Miu Miu youth club. “Fashion is relevant,” she said and smiled. “It’s my job, of course.”She showed some clothes so simple they weren’t clothes at all: primitively cut fabrics fixed to the body with fastenings, like an apron skirt tied at the hip or pieces of nylon fashioned into ponchos, dresses and skirts with drawstrings. Strands of nylon were tied around the lower hip of pleated skirts with drawstrings and worn like cummerbunds (bummerbunds?), and a bandeau top held together by a nylon strap with a plastic clip buckle seemed to have been repurposed from the performance wardrobe. In a post-normcore world, get we ready for performcore.If those garments injected the Miu Miu look that’s currently in stores with new fashion propositions with a capitalF, there were also proposals that felt more rooted in the look that’s enjoyed so much success of late. Those included blazers, their lining ripped out and pulled beneath their outer hem to reveal an underlayer so they functioned like minidresses. There were twinsets created from skirts with matching bras cut from tailoring fabrics and suspended loosely from the shoulder, and enough stone-washed leather and denim suits to dress Christiane F. circa 1981.
Miu Miu is on a roll, delivering a kind of fashion that resonates with the sexy, subversive, product-focused tastes of the digital generations—even through a simplified lens. (There were also some very surface-decorated pieces for a different kind of audience that’s definitely not into simplicity, whether figurative or literal.) Prada framed her show in fittingly odd projections by Europe-based Chinese artist Shuang Li, who had sharks bouncing off planets and walls, and a soundtrack featuring a spoken-word love poem by the same artist. If there was an upbeat mood in the room, it came from above. “I went through a really…friends died and so on,” Prada said. “Recently, I’m in a good mood, for personal happenings for my friends.”
4 October 2022
It was only fitting that Miu Miu would have the final say this season. Thanks to a change in the traditional schedule, the show rang out a month of collections, for which its last proposal set the tone in a big way. Other than Balenciaga, no brand has been as impactful as Miu Miu on the silhouette we’ve encountered on daily runways over the last four weeks: an oversized blazer or coat worn over a lingerie element and a mini- or evening skirt. This season, Miuccia Prada reiterated that influence in a collection that continued where the last one left off, reminding the industry who got the idea in the first place.The winter embodiment of the Miu Miu girl we’re still getting to know was less of a workaholic and more of a sports freak. After disrupting archaic office dress codes last season, she set her sights on the tennis court, giving Wimbledon officials more than they bargained for in super-short, low-riding Y2K skirts and tops with cheekily placed see-through lace panels. She didn’t care if it was winter because she’s too hot to get cold. Memories from her junior ballet phase (she outgrew it) manifested in ballerinas and knitted socks before her inner rebel really took over and things went hell for leather.As the same theme appeared in new variations—shearling, snakeskin-printed or stained leather, with faux-fur lapels—a more gender-diverse expression of the Miu Miu person took shape, demonstrating how the skimpy silhouette also works on nonbinary and traditionally masculine (yet very slender) physiques. Put into practice, it wasn’t a mirage. Along with every fashion girl and their mother this month, men have been wearing last season’s cropped Miu Miu cable knits and little jackets to the shows and often with viable results. This time, there was new material for them to obsess over: lace-up leather trousers, big buckle boots, and some prettily encrusted sheer crystal dresses, if there’s time for a drink after tennis.Prada invited guests to watch her show in deck chairs decorated with the animated monster motifs by the duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. As a designer who famously never sits back to relax, this season was an exception. The impact of October’s Miu Miu show was so strong it will echo far beyond the next six months, and now is the time for her to capitalize on that. Kicking back in Prada’s deck chair, you couldn’t help but smile for her.
With a co–creative director in place at Prada, it seems she now has the time to focus more on Miu Miu and show us she’s still got her singles game down to a tee.
8 March 2022
Imagine being in your mid-twenties when the pandemic hit, just about to make your debut on the corporate scene; your pressed skirt suit, ironed shirt and unwrapped nylons left abandoned in your closet for what felt like an eternity. When the world reopens and WFH is replaced with IRL, will you pull out that dusty uniform as if nothing happened? Or did something change within you? For Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu customer of the 2020s, it’s a no-brainer. When it comes to the age groups whose formative experiences were interrupted by the lockdown period, continuing on the same track as the generations before them is no longer a given.If the seismic events of the last year-and-a-half taught young people anything, it’s to question those values, norms, and, indeed, dress codes. When the Miu Miu woman returns to the office, she’s chopping up all of those preordained rules, quite literally. Today, Prada marked her own return to the office—i.e. the Palais d’Iéna where the Miu Miu show traditionally takes place—by seating her guests in ergonomic work chairs and treating us to a back-to-work wardrobe for the post-pandemic age. Like rebellious private school kids cutting up their uniforms, she shortened the length of corporate skirts and tops—frayed edges in tow—until there was barely anything left to crop.It was as if waistlines and skirt hems—and necklines and top hems—had a magnetic attraction to one another, drawing ever closer as the show progressed. Midriffs were elongated to a degree that would have made Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera collectively blush in the early 2000s, if, of course, the very sight of those low-riding baggy trousers wouldn’t have made them faint first. In the process, miniskirts migrated into top territory and morphed into belted bandeaus, and someone came to work in just a beige bra and a matching pencil skirt, the elastic band of her underwear poking out. All this, mind you, in the fabrics of a businesswoman’s wardrobe.It was a kind of normcore for an abnormal world. Prada hasn’t been doing post-show interviews this season due to Covid-19, but she did grace us with a few well-chosen words: “It’s so normal, but for me it’s so strange. Strange is not strange anymore,” she said with a shrug, and toiled on with her celebrity greetings. Certainly the new generations seem unfazed by the overt sexiness of the post-lockdown mentality.
Forget about Casual Fridays—in 2022, it’s all about Freaky Fridays, and Karen from IT Support has rolled up her merino jumper so you can see her six-pack.In case there are any apprehensive dressers left in this ‘new sexy’ climate, Prada did throw in some very viable new alternatives to the corporate wardrobe. Cable knit skirts with high slits worn with shirts and faded oversized knits made for a realistic take on ‘the generational suit,’ as did a stone-washed leather blouson with a matching box-pleat skirt. And should those Freaky Fridays ever turn into Formal Fridays—gosh, how archaic—the chopped and tattered idea of it all was applied to some lavishly embellished dresses and suits rendered in the most beautiful smoky palette.Prada’s winding white runway was lined with lens-shaped screens on which two comedy pieces directed by the Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani were shown. One saw a businesswoman surreally arguing with documents that had come to life (“May God curse you with the sharpest scissors!”). Another was an amusing conversation between Moroccan women making fun of the latest trends in plastic surgery (“They take fat from the thighs and inject it in the butt”—“OK, so it’s Halal!”). What was it Prada said? “Strange is not strange anymore.”
5 October 2021
Not long after its founding in 1993, Miu Miu, the brand that borrows Miuccia Prada’s nickname, started showing at Bryant Park during New York Fashion Week. One of these outings was for spring 1996. Giving the show a real Big City edge was its opener (later the face of the season’s advertising campaign), Chloë Sevigny, the 21-year-old star of the just-releasedKids.Harmony Korine’s famous movie is sometimes described as a coming of age film; circa 1996 Miu Miu was also in its early growing stages, but that’s about where the comparisons end. Despite the bra tops and sheer skirts showing printed pants, this collection was mannered and more about fashion than sex. (What curator Andrew Bolton dubbed the “Catholic imagination” is present in Prada’s work as a whole.) If some of the looks were teasers, there’s still the sense that you could bring the Miu Miu “girl” home to mother. In fact, some of the 1970s looks that Miu Miu fans might’ve coveted from her mother’s closet were translated here. With its muddied colors and brown plaid, this show worked the pretty/ugly dynamic that the designer was developing at this time.
30 August 2021
Miuccia Prada loves the mountains. “I remember being young, when it was hot, and you’d go skiing in your bikini,” she recalled in a digital press conference after her Miu Miu screening, taking the prize for Fashion Week’s most fabulous flashback. “It looks strange, but in the end, it’s not.” This season, her Prada collections have illustrated an internalized-externalized fashion mentality to which we can all relate, coming out of a year of domestic dressing. Captured epically in high snow in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, her Miu Miu collection took that emotion to an extreme.Through a literal lens, it was the most obvious transition from indoor to outdoor dressing you could imagine: a code-switch between lingerie and skiwear. Figuratively, it was post-confinement psychology: a material outpouring of our mental state of undress and the compulsion to cover it up and put our best (and furriest) foot forward. Padded bustiers and bodices proposed alongside silk-satin slip dresses—some with aggressive spiky straps—conceived a kind of alpine lingerie (“For me, very sexy stuff,” said Prada) juxtaposed by mittens and mountain boots fit for a faux-fur yeti.“I walk a lot in the mountains and when it’s bad weather, it’s difficult,” Prada reflected. “Little by little, I realized what I was trying to say: Bravery. The dream to do something that’s important and difficult. The clothes are not romantic but the spirit is.” Like animals emerging from hibernation—exhausted from the energy they spend keeping themselves alive in hiding—our return to normal is laden with anxiety, mainly because normal won’t be the normal we knew. As a result, our relationship with clothes will change.In a cliché world, we’ll dress for self-protection—furry mega boots for the brave—but the Miu Miu collection was a lot more layered than that. The show notes recounted the production of the impressive video as “a difficult and brave undertaking.” Prada spoke about its contrasts between panorama shots and close-ups as a relation between “the person and the grandness.” It summed up an ambivalent approach to the post-lockdown wardrobe many can identify with: a desire to hide and dress up all at once. “Daring clothes, but possible,” Prada said.
The collection offered methods to the madness in meetings between the two poles, like oversized ski suits rendered in dusty pastel boudoir satins, knitted balaclavas (that double as a face mask), girly and glamorous takes on Fair Isle jumpers, and the jumpsuits—in this case, ski onesies—that Prada has been pushing in a big way this season. We’ve tired of talk of comfy lockdown dressing by now, but many of these garments really were very viable proposals for those not quite ready to leave those comforts behind.The film climaxed in a bonfire ritual in the snow. It felt pagan, like a love letter to the nature the world seems to have reconnected with over the past year, and gained new respect for. “Nature is the one thing that heals you,” Prada said. “I love mountain adventures.”
9 March 2021
The Miu Miu resort collection was shown with no fanfare in its Milanese showroom months ago. The arrival of these images is an indicator of how fashion timelines have been disrupted by the pandemic; as a prequel to the spring 2021 show, which was recently livestreamed on video, these pictures would have once been introduced before it. But aligning deliveries with the seasons is now a business priority for fashion companies, as it raises the hopes of whetting the customers’ appetite for a bit of festive dressing up, forcing them out of exhausted sweats and worn-out loungewear. Christmas is definitely coming—but parties?Giving in to doom and gloom isn’t a sensible option—it won’t turn the situation around for the better. Confronting the present circumstances by taking a positive stance seems the intelligent—albeit rather difficult—thing to do. And if the young Miu Miu clients are up for celebration, longing for a good time, who can blame such sentiments? Buying a good piece of fashion is a bona fide mood lifter that can help fight pandemic fatigue after the variously orchestrated curfews and quarantines.Miu Miu fans will find plenty to like in this collection. As the look book’s images prove well enough, it’s a rather diverse offering, full of delightfully mismatched concoctions of vintage-y frocks, sporty pieces, glam eveningwear, and seductive lingerie. The overall effect is sensuality tinged with irreverence, ingenuity spiked with self-confidence, and a certain cheeky nonchalance. Jumbling a tux with a pair of track pants, throwing a men’s silk robe de chambre over a rose-printed strapless prom dress, or wearing a cool rockabilly coat with a leopard-printed frilly crinoline—the Miu Miu woman is a master of artsy self-representation, reconciling clashing pieces into unconventional-enough, yet well-put-together looks. She apparently knows how to balance what’s off-balance—which sounds exactly what we should all be trying to do now.
29 October 2020
The limitations caused by the pandemic have been tough on the youth. The physical group activities so vital to the formative years of tweens and teens and twenty-somethings have been disrupted: no sports, no school, no summer parties until sunrise. Zooms, FaceTimes, and livestreams can substitute a lot, but never the real thing. While the fangirls who fawn over Miu Miu did have to experience this season’s show without the atmosphere of an audience, Miuccia Prada gifted them with the communal spirit of girlhood. Livestreamed from Milan, the show set imagined a cyber-spacious sports arena covered in screens with the—also livestreamed—faces of Miu Miu poster girls watching the show, including Elle Fanning, Chloé Sevigny, and various influencers.Opened by Lila Moss (the 18-year-old daughter of Kate)—whose English rose features could have been the subject of a Lord Byron poem on youth and beauty—the collection captured the accidental uniforms of young people. Too under-construction to have developed the dress codes that shape their wardrobes later in life, the youth’s uniforms materialize around the duties and pastimes that the pandemic took away from them this year. It’s a wardrobe suspended between the extremes of the hyper-casual and that stilted sense of formality you get from a prom photo. “Polarity. These are polar times,” as Prada said in a statement after the show.“The reason why people dress is sometimes to please, sometimes to be sexy, sometimes to be socially relevant, sometimes for a job. The way you present yourself—the clothes are important because they define you in a second. Clothes are a tool for that message,” she continued. “The first spectator of yourself is you.” The Miu Miu show read like theEuphoriageneration’s guide to effortless dressing: the things you wear through the process of learning the messages Prada wanted to convey about the role of clothes in life. Prim and pristine low-riding track pants, sharp track jackets, micro skirts, and kitten-heeled tennis shoes embodied the dress codes of sports activities. Sporty blazers, little bowling jackets, neat shirts, and plaid skirts evoked school uniforms.Conceived in the teenage dreams of perfect party outfits (possibly in the 1990s, but I could be projecting), there were techno-fied halter-neck shell tops and oscillating techy dresses.
Then, some dream prom scenarios as well, like a white dress with a draped bow on the back that curtained dramatically to the side to reveal its pink lining. For all its youthfulness, you imagine Miu Miu probably isn’t something young people are able to buy in bulk. But the community of youth that Prada portrays with a collection like this pushes some universal buttons of desirability and unity that we are all hankering for at this moment in time.Similarly, Prada’s show notes talked about the institution of the fashion show as a unifying event—something she wanted to convey through her livestreamed experience. Carried by the young women on her runway, that sentiment reminded some of us of the time we fell in love with fashion shows in the first place; in our teenage bedroom, chunky laptop at hand, waiting for the first runway pictures from our favorite shows to come in… live from Paris Fashion Week.
6 October 2020
How the lens has changed when we look at clothes that date from the Great Before. Miu Miu’s fall 2020 runway show was fated to be one of the last in Paris (on March 3). Who knows when we will reconvene for a packed-together fashion gathering again? These clothes—the pre-fall 2020 collection released here in look-book form—were first seen by reviewers in Paris in January, in one of those whizz-through showroom appointments that pass in a blur between the menswear shows.Miuccia Prada has always said that Miu Miu is her more spontaneous, less intellectual reaction to her feelings. This one foreshadowed the main collection’s thread, which was about glamour and the joy of dressing up, from a young woman’s point of view. Something about the visuals suggests the awkwardness of a girl standing, perhaps, at the periphery of a party or a wedding—a throwback to a late-’60s, early ’70s mood which quite possibly reminded Miuccia of herself at that time. Now that there are only Zoom parties and socially distanced mini-wedding celebrations to attend, what remains as relevant? Anything with top-detail (there’s actually a lot amongst the eyelet, Peter Pan collars, and pearl-beaded bibs), and then, the patch-worked prairie dress looks, which look notionally well-adapted to the dog-walking and chore-running that are the sum of most of our circumscribed outdoor routines during lockdown.
27 May 2020
The scene at Miu Miu today suggested a chic movie premiere from a bygone era. After the monthlong marathon of shows, the plush Art Deco carpet and red velvet theater seats were certainly a boon to those who those attended this afternoon. Toying With Elegance was the title of the new collection, an allusion to the childlike joy that comes with getting dressed to the nines. After a week that has been marred by dystopian narratives—both on and off the runway—that optimistic messaging was a breath of fresh air.The show opened with a charming cameo: Storm Reid, the 16-year-old actor ofEuphoriafame, took to the runway in a persimmon crushed-satin dress and tweed overcoat, her braids curled into a sophisticated ’40s updo. Prada has evoked all kinds of iconic screen sirens with her clothes in the past—Hitchcockian blondes, heroines ofneorealismocinema, and more—so it was nice to see that idea of glamour reconfigured for generation Z.British singer Rita Ora also made a surprise appearance, though she was almost unrecognizable in her floor-sweeping military-style coat. Those extra-long proportions lent a sense of irreverence to the sweet empire-line dresses in saccharine shades that were replete with bows and crystal embellishments. The leg-baring little black dresses were just as fun with their frothy taffeta sleeves and colorful nipped waistbands. In a season of sober daywear, the new collection offered up plenty of cool new reasons to join the party again.You could see many of the stylish young starlets making mental notes of those evening looks from the front row, including Lucy Hale and Anya Taylor Wood, star of the much buzzed-aboutEmma. Miu Miu's track record for dressing Hollywood ingénues for the red carpet, a world in which youthful fashion ideas are few and far between, is unparalleled. Pulled from the brand’s archives, the outfit Reid wore to the after-party was living proof: a chic draped terra-cotta orange top and black pencil skirt that looked just as fresh that night as it did when it was first shown in 2011.
3 March 2020
Miuccia Prada has always said that her impulses for Miu Miu are much more spontaneous, from the heart, than the propositions she formulates for Prada. But where did her off-the-cuff ideas spring from in this of all seasons, after she’d essentially stripped back Prada to what magnetized people in the ’90s? From “a base which is serious and structured, and after that each person does what they wish with it,” she extemporized. “Something raw, simple, naive, not a big deal. Suggesting a way of dressing, and after they’re free to do their own thing. That is even reflected in the wood, the set, like theaters where people used to do improvisation.”Improvisational theater was Prada’s first outlet for creativity, after all; she spent five years at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan before she even thought of joining the family accessories firm. This was her take two of the season on going back to her beginnings, then; and one into which it’s easy to read a much more telling autobiographical backstory. Here was a group of young women with home-crimped late-1940s/early-1950s hair, doing their level best to be Italian-movie-star glamorous in a time of postwar make do and mend.Remember what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers used to be able to do with not very much, she seemed to say. The idea of altering, remaking, and sex-ifying a wardrobe that might be limited by resources—but never by indomitable female ingenuity—came through. These were girls who seemed to have altered the buttons on their coats; made new summer dresses by patching the top of a satin cocktail dress to a printed curtain; decided to add a flounce to a skirt or a shoulder strap with a bit of spare fabric; maybe even painted the flowers on their leather coats themselves.It wasn’t the first time this season that the notion of converting household linen into garments has come up—here you could imagine girls who’d cut up bedsheets to run up into dresses and long, slim skirts on home sewing machines. There were Miu Miu demonstrations of how to make even the scrappiest, rattiest old knitwear off-the-shoulder sexy. Distinct echoes of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren asneorealismomovie heroines ran through it. Even the accessories spelled Italian ingenuity in times of scarce resources—unmistakable references to the type of wooden wedges made famous by Salvatore Ferragamo; to the bamboo made into bag handles by Guccio Gucci.And so on.
There was plenty that didn’t fit this playbill—luxurious leather gilets, much in the way of brightly colored duchesse satin. Miu Miu must sell merchandise that appeals in many markets. But strangely—or appropriately—given the way the world is going, it was the “old” message that read as the newest. If we’re entering a time of buying less and being careful not to throw things away, look how much creative fun a girl can still have.
1 October 2019
Why in the world were we at the Hippodrome d’Auteuil, a Paris steeplechase track dating to 1873, for Miu Miu today? Miuccia Prada gave two answers as her guests queued for the post-runway buffet. First: This is a destination show, like Gucci in Rome, Dior in Marrakech, and Prada back in New York. It must be Instagrammable, and there has to be room enough for the after-party. “We had to search for a place,” she said, and the Hippodrome fit the bill. Second, as sports go, Prada considers horse racing conservative, and she’s eager to address that subject at the moment. “If I have to say something, it’s about playing with conservatism, with glamour and fun. Conservatism is something that worries me in general.”That tracks with what Prada said at the Prada show back in May, at the beginning of this two-month-long Resort season. “I’m sensitive to the political situation,” she remarked. “It affects me.”Miu Miu’s conservatism is not what most people would recognize as such, of course. Yes, the shapes were fairly straightforward. There were high-waist shorts and double-breasted blazers with the sleeves rolled up past the elbows, printed tea dresses with Chelsea collars, and a handful of bedazzled pouf-sleeve minidresses. But—here comes the glamour and the fun—they paraded out on sky-high cork- or mirror-soled platforms worn with bobby socks. And then there were the hats: cloches or newsboys or floppy-brimmed sun hats layered over baseball caps. Assembled one on top of the other, their proportions conjured visions of Ascot. A tweaked version of Ascot; Prada said she’s never been.The collection’s decorative elements, too, were lifted from the racetrack. Sweaters were color-blocked and striped like traditional jockey’s jerseys, and horse and chariot prints as well as horseshoes were recurring motifs on silk dresses. Though they fit with the day-at-the-races theme, they weren’t the show’s major takeaways. Miu Miu’s young crowd may be tempted by the novelty factor of the elongated Chelsea collars that turned up on so many looks, and they’ll definitely go for the roomy shorts-and-platforms outfits, with miles of bare legs in between. The sparkly minidresses are also sure to please.
29 June 2019
A darkened room and strange, vaguely menacing flooring: Welcome to the Fall 2019 collections, which neared their gloomy, emo end this afternoon with Miuccia Prada’s showing for Miu Miu. This time, the black-walled corridors and felted carpet insulation led the way to a catwalk lined with illuminated photographs, video screens, and stacks of vintage televisions showing work by the young New Zealand–born, London-based artist Sharna Osborne. Disheveled teens in lingerie, blinking eyes, darkened windows, discarded Disney-theme toys, Dolly Parton, and roses, lots of roses: This is the bewitching mash-up of innocence and perversity, wonder, and loss, that speaks to fairy tales and allegories, and that has often defined the stubborn, soulful, and yet partial-to-sparkle Miu Miu girl.Come Fall, that girl (or woman, although, warning, this is a collection that skews young) will wear a cape, be it tweed or crocheted, of faux leather or hearty canvas. It’s a diverse and plentiful assortment covering heritage, utility, artisanal, and evening; Miuccia Prada chose to highlight the cape because it is a garment that nods to both history and protection, and she sees in young people a desire to clothe themselves in something with meaning, given the perilous state of the world, and especially the environment.And so, to stand tall in a profoundly harsh climate, a young person of today needs that swagger, as well as a floral backpack (trend item!), a baby doll or mini skater dress (loveliest in cherry blossoms), a chain mail collar (why not?), and a boot or sandal with a massive and humorously unsightly mountain of tread and sole. (These are the ugliest ugly shoes ever, and that’s a feat worthy of high praise in fashion land.) The stay-up tights are decorated with jewels and flowers, and there are glittery heels and velvet flats, all the touch points of the magpie Miu Miu wardrobe. The overall look is clever and romantic, and says something akin to this: I’ve been through the woods. I’ve gotten past the wolf. I like fairy tales, but I don’t live in one. I know the forest from the trees.
5 March 2019
After her sumptuous Miu Miu Resort show, with all of its long, elegant dresses, and her stunningly fashion-intensive coed Fall men’s and Pre-Fall Prada womenswear, this is the lookbook for Miu Miu Pre-Fall. Considering all that activity, she can be forgiven for getting back to a few core basics—if we can avoid sounding ridiculous in calling them that, because Miu Miu in regular mode is anybody else’s glittery, decorated, and cute.It’s also super-teeny, the inspirational teen in question being Lady Diana Spencer in the ’80s, on a supposed trip to the Austrian Tyrol. That’s shorthand for exaggeratedly frilled shirts, Tyrolean flowers on hand knits, dirndl corsetry, broderie anglaise smocks, and walking boots. The future Princess of Wales was never photographed in gold leather underpants, otherwise she’d never have become the Princess of Wales, but hey, that’s a literal thought too far. What are very Lady Di—and indeed Mrs. P—are the white cotton and lace-trimmed collars. It turns out that they are purchasable as stand-alone accessories. As we said, cute.
21 January 2019
Wonky couture emerged as a theme this season as fashion begins to edge away from the hoodie-and-trainers years. That puts Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu in a sweet spot. Long ago, back when Gen Zers were but twinkles in their parents’ eyes, she’d started ripping up ’50s and ’60s clothes and making collections of stuff which looked like synthetic linings and leftover haberdashery. All that was back today, in the form of crushed cocktail frocks, squashy bows, randomly placed rosettes, slip skirts, and a large dose of sparkle.Oddly enough though, this time it felt as if there was more in the way of solid Miu Miu clothes-as-clothes than in the Spring Prada show. Barring the micro-shorts and the oops-I-forgot-my-skirt looks familiar to this label, there were plenty of wearable midi lengths in dirty denim skirts and dresses, and—surprise, surprise—below-the-knee faux python pencil skirts. Two neat, clean, double-breasted leather coats turned up. And then—very unexpectedly—a run of straight-up well cut, non-ironical gray blazers and skirt suits in matching leather.There was nothing at all wonky about those. Despite all the things that were tricked up with sequins and diamanté, it was this turn toward well cut tailoring which ultimately stuck in the mind. It almost looked minimalist. Grown-up. Oddly incongruous on the very young models. Has Miuccia Prada got her eye on winning back the class of women who used to dress in her simple, no-logo, non-showy clothes in the ’90s? After all, they need a home.
2 October 2018
As of two days ago there were no celebrities walking the Miu Miu show. Then inspiration struck, and Miuccia Prada and her team started making calls, asking guests if they’d like to swap roles for a night. “We called them in the morning, they jumped on the plane, and then they arrived—they all said yes,” the designer exclaimed, genuinely delighted with the turnout. It was a starry multigenerational crew, fromStranger Thing’s Sadie Sink to Chloë Sevigny, Gwendoline Christie, and Uma Thurman. “Uma told me, ‘I’ve never had a decision so spontaneous since ages,’ ” Prada continued.That idea of spontaneity was echoed in the Resort collection. This season’s Miu Miu woman was either stepping out to the local boulangerie in her pj’s and fluffy slippers or she was just home from a wild party, in a silk duchesse gown scattered with strass and a grandpa cardigan. Prada seemed turned on by that liminal state. She’s coming, she’s going, she’s on the threshold of something. The Regina Hotel, an old stalwart of the traveling fashion crowd whose popularity is coming around again, was the setting for the show. “A hotel has mystery, intrigue, and stories,” Prada said. Filmy peignoirs notwithstanding, the story never got too steamy. Most of the sheer pieces were layered over sporty bandeau tops and briefs in cheery prints. (The collection was rounded out acid wash denim and spongy athletic separates, but they were a weak subplot.)It wasn’t just the presence of Roman Polanski at the show that conjured images ofRosemary’s Baby. A model with Mia Farrow’s strawberry blonde pixie cut wore a baby doll dress that could’ve been lifted from the film’s wardrobe closet. That 1968 movie has become a touch point in the era of Me Too and a U.S. Supreme Court poised to potentially overturn Roe v. Wade. Addressing those issues wasn’t Prada’s intention. She insisted that with Resort—“this collection in the middle,” she called it—“she feels more free and has more fun.” At the after-party you got her drift. The models and actresses wore their looks straight off the catwalk and into the crowd and in their spangly shifts and minis and dresses with deep cut-outs at the ribs they looked utterly right in the steamy Paris evening. Also: Rowan Blanchard’s duchesse satin gown with the asymmetrical gold leopard lamé strap will be getting its own star turn on a red carpet imminently.
30 June 2018
A massive whoop went up at the beginning of the Miu Miu show. It emanated from the direction of a bench containing those two miscreants, Marc Jacobs and Gwendoline Christie, who were cheering and clapping Elle Fanning on her maiden voyage around a runway. Fanning was sporting a high quiff, flicky eyeliner, a tan ’60s overcoat, blue chiffon neckerchief, and a pair of low, buckled bootees. Lots of other characters followed—a hard suburban girl gang who stomped around wearing their deliberately badly teased beehives and shaved heads with conviction. Miuccia Prada loves an excuse to throw Miu Miu back to the ’50s and ’60s, but this time she said she was less interested in explaining the theoretical whys and wherefores than in portraying “personalities, different people, and to be diverse, not just in terms of race, but of being big or little.”They were certainly a cast of characters—the likes of Slick Woods, Edie Campbell, Adwoa Aboah, Georgia Jagger, Lily McMenamy, and Kaia Gerber. They were wearing clothes which soon began ringing bells among members of the audience who’ve seenKarlheinz Weinberger: Swiss Rebels, the influential work of the man who photographed a real subcult of extreme teen Elvis-mad rockers and greasers in the ’50s and ’60s. The doubled, buckled belts, the chain necklaces, mohair sweaters, and hairdos were liftoff points for a collection that had fun with bleached denim and a whole series of exaggerated dogtooth tweed and cheesy pastel leather jackets and coats.For evening, the show majored in strapless brocade below-the-knee pencil dresses, like the sort of vintage rarities girls would fight over at the flea market. No need to now: The whole wardrobe, from fringed scarves to pointy low ankle boots, will be there at Miu Miu come fall.
6 March 2018
Fashion is preparing itself for the arrival of Gen Z as a purchasing force. In the Prada corporation, Miu Miu is increasingly being positioned as the brand’s teen sister to Prada’s more intellectual grown-up—or at least that’s how this Pre-Fall collection looks. With its blowsy hair bows, metallic leather rah-rah and poufed skirts, and preppy argyle knits, it’s easy to see how it plays straight into the suburban ’80s trend triggered byStranger Things.In this awards season, the phenomenal success of that TV series and others, such asGame of Thrones, has presented stylists with the problem of how to dress child stars in age-appropriate clothes for public events. Well, they need fret no more. Miu Miu has all those eventualities dealt with, from wintry tartan coats for red carpet lingering to suitably covered-up but nonprim long black dresses—all perfect for the rising generation that particularly needs to demonstrate its solidarity with Time’s Up.
24 January 2018
White plastic stacking chairs of the cheap café and garden furniture variety: Who knows who originally inflicted this ugly, unloved piece of non-design on the planet, or when. Anyway. There we were at Miu Miu, when—to the mild surprise of press and international buyers—we arrived to discover that our posteriors were to be pressed to these common products. For Miu Miu is a show at which we all “read” chairs. Sets and furniture are extensively parsed and scrambled over for Miuccia Prada’s messages and meanings.So: Spring 2018. Was the white chair seating a signifier that Miu Miu was to plummet down market? Well, not quite. This is a moment when the appropriation or transformation of existing products is a big thing. The new guard of influential designers (see Balenciaga, Gucci, Vetements) are all at it. Was Miuccia Prada playing the same game? Was her Miu Miu collection deliberately (or unconsciously) part of her mission to point at classic vintage teenager clothes, and say, “This is my personal taste in clothes that are what they are”?It was all reassuringly similar to the ’50s and ’60s college kid and prom clothes that baby boomers, like Prada herself, began making their own when they were young. The makings—the ballerina-length circle-skirted lace dresses, the checked lumberjack shirts and college boy sweaters—were taken up again by club kids in the ’80s, who found all these clothes in thrift shops. Prada’s main Spring collection channeled that second-time-around early-’80s New Wave energy in Milan.The third wave she’s proposing now at Miu Miu is not as literal as reproducing a white plastic chair would be. There were never these exact utilitarian tablecloth and suburban wallpaper prints on leather coats and dresses in the ’50s or the ’80s, and they stood out as innovation in this show. Neither, in real life, did most people wear neon socks with their kitten-heel slingbacks. Nor, in general, did girls ever walk around in transparent dresses with their underwear fully visible. Give it to Miuccia Prada: This last notion is an idea she has been pushing since the ’90s. Though still not in widespread use, it’s become a styling trick in general use, from Christopher Kane to Christian Dior, on this season’s runways. Now: being able to quote oneself as an act of reappropriation? That’s quite a testament to Miuccia Prada’s stature.
3 October 2017
The Miu Miu presentation went down in the Paris Automobile Club next door to the newly reopened post-renovation Hôtel de Crillon. Elle Fanning and Milla Jovovich were at a table up front, and Gwendoline Christie was holding court further back. Everybody was swilling Champagne and chomping on candied almonds. Haute couture week was once considered the sleepier, easier cousin of ready-to-wear, but Spring and Resort shows and at least one genuine Fall 2017 couture collection were stacked back-to-back, starting from 10 o’clock this morning. At least Miuccia Prada knows how to throw a good party. Tommy Genesis, the Canadian fetish rapper with a thing for F-bombs, warmed up the crowd, and there was an all-star model cast: Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Joan Smalls, and Jourdan Dunn mixed with the newcomers.As for the collection, it picked up where Ms. P’s men’s Prada show left off: with jumpsuits. Genesis’s baby blue compact knit romper started the proceedings, and after that they came fast and furious: short or long, in an orange compact knit, in all manner of silk prints, in navy satin, in gingham, and in sturdy cotton with the torso and sleeves cinched at the waist. Many of them featured patches with the nameMarilynstitched on them, as in Monroe, presumably; “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” was one of the oldies but goodies on the soundtrack. Prada mashed up body-repair-shop uniforms with Hawaiian prints and a good number of furs featuring trompe l’oeil intarsia patches and delicate bracelet sleeves.Now you can get an all-in-one from just about every brand out there these days. What distinguishes Miu Miu’s are those patches, the strass embroideries, and the special pieces they were paired up with—the vaguely 1940s silk blouses with crystals at the shoulders come to mind. This is a brand, like its big sister label, that has become very clever about creating identifiable, and hence collectible, items. Along those lines, the intarsia furs are going to be a hit.
2 July 2017
She’d had the entire place—hall, chairs, pillars, floors, sweeping Art Deco staircases, and all—smothered in lavender fake fur of a cheesy, curly, astrakhan-imitating kind. Bringing down the curtain on Fall 2017 (the fashion shows have been running through the weirdest, most conflict-ridden political four weeks since the late 1960s), Miuccia Prada knew exactly what advice to offer the Miu Miu girls of the world: “It’s about the madness of glamour, in front of an uncertain future,” she said, and then added, “and I am getting really interested in so many kinds of beauty.” In other words? Face it down, glam it out, andrepresent!Good, good. They were all there, women of various backgrounds and races. They were an army, clad in synthetically kitsch multi-pastel furry baker-boy hats, coats, and skirts; brilliant clashing psychedelic-print tunics and flares; glittery jewels; and big-shouldered knit sweaters and skirts that hearkened back to the 1940s and ’70s. There were paillettes aplenty—short dresses and skimpy, slinky lingerie slips twinkling with diamanté, accessorized with huge crazy-framed sunglasses.It was all a hundred percent Miu Miu, of course, but with the color and the commitment to the surreal enjoyment of clothes turned up to max volume. Luxury fashion is engaged in a battle to justify its raison d’être in these dark times, as Miuccia Prada—perhaps its foremost feminist leader—knows very well. The madness of glamour? Historically, dressing up against the odds was a female retort to the Great Depression and a psychological defense during World War II. In the crisis that faces women’s rights now, fashion may seem to be only of small help. Yet it has a duty to show a way and to put its own house in order in areas where it has been slacking for far too long. If nothing else, the beautiful inclusiveness on this runway was the overriding message that wrapped up this season—from which there can be no turning back.
7 March 2017
You could practically costume a period movie with the Pre-Fall Miu Miu collection. If a director and a wardrobe stylist got together and wanted to shoot a story about girls in New York City, say, sometime in the ’40s to early ’50s, they'd find clothes galore for teenage bobby-soxers and elegant Harlem ladies here.The narratives of nostalgia are so woven into the fabric of Miu Miu that it’s hardly a surprise to see Miuccia Prada picking a mid-20th-century vintage theme. Sometimes, she’ll veer to the ’60s, ’70s, or early ’80s, but this time her ideas seemed to stem from further back. For the uptown ladies: graceful ankle-length dresses, giant velvet silver-studded wedges, and glam teal-and white or pink-and-white fur coats and chubbies. For the ’50s teenagers: The entire kit of blanket-check wool A-line skirts, varsity jackets, and high-waisted blue jeans or brown corduroy workwear pants rolled up at the hems to display socks with chunky golf shoes or pointy low-heeled Mary Janes, and loads of furry or leather baseball caps.It wasn’t exactly faithful to the period—Prada-isms like the deliberately perma-creased floral silk lining dresses, the character of the bags, and the jeweled embroideries give that away. But there’s tons of fun things to buy, and those ’40s dresses should have the Miu Miu faithful flocking.
27 January 2017
Swim caps on, beach towels at the ready!Miuccia Pradawas apparently in a playful summer mood when she put together theMiu Miucollection (though, sadly, her models weren’t smiling about it). At a time when there’s so much trouble and stress in the world, it’s sometimes a treat to take a break from thinking too much. Who, at this juncture, wouldn’t want to buy into the sunny retro-fantasy of Italy at its glamorous postwar peak?That’s when Prada was a girl, of course. This is a period she knows so well—the optimistic culture of ’60s and early-’70s prints (schematic daisies; abstract art; and hand-smocked baby dresses for little children transformed into cropped blouses). She also grew up with a mother and a grandmother who wore lovely ’40s-print dresses; on the runway were several extremely tempting examples of these, complete with back ties.All of these looks were accompanied either by beach slides or wedge sandals, which, on close inspection, had shells and starfish embossed into them. Later, they were worn by delightfully sexy ’50s pinup girls in ruched bikinis. All this, of course, would be to overlook the multiple examples of ’60s fit-and-flare coats in this collection. It was a great deal of fun, gratefully received in this time of chaos.
5 October 2016
Tonight Miuccia Prada threw a rackety party in a Belle Epoque Paris men’s club to launch her latestMiu Miucollection, based, we were told on “about ’90s rave culture." Once upon a time the building belonged to a grande horizontale, a courtesan (or, in modern parlance, a prostitute or sex worker) who was obviously highly successful, as there was no inch of the place that wasn’t either gilded or carved from marble. Anyway: These days, you take your fashion wherever it pops up, and in Miu Miu’s case, it was in an upper salon of this gent’s club, on dummies.Viewed in real time, the collection did not look so much like clothes directly inspired by a specific British music scene of 20 years ago. Miu Miu this season, as always, is a brand that emphasizes embellishment and print, and this collection was strong on both, from T-shirts to dresses to knits to hats. The styling here might not stir up nostalgia in anyone who was born in the ’90s—they'd be too young. Still, all that scarcely matters, as by the time Resort hits stores worldwide it’s just going to look like a colorful series of fun pieces to absorb into an existing wardrobe.
4 July 2016
What isMiu Miuabout? “Dressing with what’s left. Nobility and misery!” exclaimedMiuccia Prada. Contrarily, she was laughing as she said it. Then she added, “I wanted it to be fun. I was afraid not to excite people.” Oh well, if we’re all about to face the apocalypse, we might as well go down looking hot.Mustering a judgment on a show of many parts—a lineup that covered everything from denim jackets to white shirting to military tailoring to waxed outdoor jackets to tweeds to early-’70s tapestry maxis and ’80s taffeta dresses and velvety eveningwear—isn’t that easy. True, it was a spread-out show. There were sections that fleetingly captured the spirit of the Young Fogeys, a posh, conservative London style tribe of the ’80s: tweed jodhpur suits, and belted black taffeta sub-Ungaro nightclub dresses. There was a turn for the romantic-gone-middle-aged tapestry maxi skirts and jackets of the ’70s. There were lustrous 17th-century Florentine-evoking silk velvet brocades in dusty pink and turquoise, made into ’50s coats. It was all intercut with sightings of “Don’t care, I’m off to bed” pearl-decorated slides, shuffling off as if to call it a night.But with Miu Miu, in its position finishing off the season, one must always stay alert to Miuccia Prada’s knack of hinting at an agenda for the next round. This time, where was it? Not in the clothes themselves, but in some of the casting. In a season when there’s been so much agitation around the subject of diversity, it was good to see models of various ethnicities on the Miu Miu runway.Pradaalso added a new, sexy, curvy class of woman representation to the scene in the resplendent forms ofAdriana LimaandLara Stone. More power to the influence of that, next season.
9 March 2016
We trooped into the ParisMiu Miustore to seeMiuccia Prada’s Pre-Fall collection, and there was something nice about that. Seeing a little, non-pretentious show of girls walking in front of us, on carpet, felt like something out of the olden days, long before we were born, when shops and department stores hired local models to parade the latest fashions to the good customers of the county. Between the sensible tailored knickerbocker suits and the high-belted ’70s coats, there was a reassuring air of throwback-ness about the clothes, too—not necessarily because of their historic reference points, but because everything about them was so recognizably Miu Miu–toned to the core.Sometimes there can be too much rushing on from one thing to another in fashion, and far too much artistic philosophizing—so this time it was refreshing to see Miuccia Prada dispense with all that, and just get on with showing the depth and breadth of product Miu Miu offers. Working upwards from the foot, it might involve the following: baroque brocade ballet slippers decorated with punkish leather straps and buckles and a couple of bars of glitter, tied with crisscross ribbons around the ankles of a pair of thick gray ribbed hiking socks, worn under a floral A-line midi dress, which comes layered over a sweater, and then has a coat on top, a checkered cashmere scarf, and the finishing touch of a pair of dangly diamanté earrings. That might not be a literal description of a single outfit, but you get the drift: The more you looked, the more desirable the layerings became—the emerald green corduroy coat, the plum and bottle green velvet platform ankle boots, the cream smock with the frilly yoke, the knitted cape, the poisonous purple balloon-sleeved guipure lace dress, the almost “pre-worn” tote bags several girls were carrying, as if they’d had them forever.Truthfully, there is no great narrative to relate about these clothes—or if there is, Miuccia Prada wasn’t there to tell it. All there is to say is that she did away with the costs of hiring a venue and an architect to build a set this season, and thereby let us concentrate all our attention on the many merits of her clothes and accessories. If there was one disappointment, it was this: Unlike in the olden days, the show did not lead to an opportunity to move over and shop the collection there and then. Given the chance, there were plenty of people in the audience who’d have cleaned out the stock.
25 January 2016
Miuccia Pradais interested in the political and the pervy. Always has been—but especially now. Today’sMiu Miushow had kitschy nylon-looking negligees layered over sweaters and gingham shirts; it involved wintry purple and green lozenge-patterned narrow coats and midi pencil skirts, fur stoles and boxy Deco-patterned cardigans. Anxious that this doesn’t make sense? Don’t be. That is exactly Prada’s point. Though the outrageous glam rock–meets-Kiss multicolored patchwork platform boots are her other point, obviously: They might as well have had “Buy Me Now” picked out in the glitter on their heels. It all came out in an end-of-season conversation in the dark at the conclusion of the Miu Miu presentation—the show at which the audience is always stir-crazy after looking at clothes for 28 days in four cities and not exactly feeling entirely compos mentis. Neither is Prada, who talked about how she had to put together both the mainlinePradacollection and Miu Miu in the midst of dealing with the passing of her 103-year-old aunt, Nana, whom she described as “a second mother.” The designer wasn’t at the Prada show, so this was the first time she surfaced in public this season. “Really, Miu Miu was about irrationality,” she began. “The times we are in are extreme. There’s conservatism on both the right and left in politics. And then, people look for escapes from it, attracted to strange religious beliefs or underground clubs and music.” One of the underground clubs she’s thinking of is definitely kinky—a “sexy salon,” she quipped, laughing as she indicated those see-through negligees, which were caught up in quite a few looks. As so often was the case this season, the assemblages on this runway seemed made to be pulled apart, layer by layer, and absorbed into a woman’s wardrobe in whatever manner makes sense to her. The ways of high-fashion styling are indeed extreme, but surely even the most ambitious blogger won’t be daring enough to parade herself in the full Miu Miu rig in front of next season’s street photographers. Ladies suffering from dementia may be seen going out shopping thus attired, forgetting in which order the nightie goes on, but mimicking them in full may be a few steps too far down the road toward kooky delirium for most.
On the other hand, there were the aforementioned boots, a major draw in a season of loudly decorative footwork, not to mention more conservatively sweet ballet slippers (again with a touch of the “confused” in their mismatched ribbon ankle ties), tiaras, ruffle-neck blouses, aSwan Laketutu—and within it all, goth black-and-white silk pieces printed with candles and cigarette lighters, surely a mini collection unto itself. There’s a method to Miu Miu’s madness after all.
7 October 2015
It would be highly unlikely if Miuccia Prada wasn't aware of this particularly strange, vicious world that is unfolding around us. And as much as she understands that, she also appreciates the necessity of escape. Distilling the point: Mrs. P. sure knows how to stage a rave. Years ago, when Miu Miu opened in London, she threw an all-nighter at the In and Out Club. She danced wildly with her husband, real diamonds strung wantonly through her hair. The essence of that evening came round to haunt us again tonight, when she launched her Miu Miu Resort collection and her very first perfume for the brand in a full-on party atmosphere that might have been a raging distraction for the professionals at hand but was a stone-gone blast for everyone else in the place.There was something Gatsby-esque about the whole presentation. The models pranced around an elevated gantry, way untouchable, dazzle from afar. The dropped waists and banker-stripe shirts said pre-Crash 1920s and 1990s, the tiny shifts with their scoops of embroidery said 1980s. The perforations were purest 21st-century lace. The sense of dancing on the lip of a volcano was intense. Where will these extreme, beautiful, technical clothes end up? That's not a consideration for the people who will be buying them.
4 July 2015
"Pleasure is our business," declared Sigue Sigue Sputnik, or rather The Sputnik Corporation, for one of their fake ads on the debut album,Flaunt It(1986). The album was also interspersed with real ads for, among others,i-Dmagazine ("Once considered the most pretentious magazine in the world, now merely the best") and St-St-Studio Line by Loréal ("Fixing gel, strong hold, be bold. Create your look"). This is what could be heard interspersed with some of Talking Heads' greatest songs ("Once in a Lifetime," "Memories Can't Wait," "Burning Down the House"…) as the cacophonous soundtrack for today's terrific Miu Miu show, and it all added to the cheeky, sensory, consumerist overload of Miuccia Prada's latest collection.If that soundtrack sounds a little arch and postmodern, well, it was; it was also fantastic and fun, as was the latest Miu Miu offering. It provided clues to that little bit of disconcerting intent in this collection. As is often the case in Pradaland, there is always a drop of poison with the sugar-candy consumer desirability of this clothing—and that is what makes it all the more addictive, of course.Today Prada decided to revel in fabricating the absolute fake—something better than the real thing. This wasn't just a collection of animal prints and patterns, rich, dense, and delightful in plastic croco skirts and shifts, embossed artificial leopard print—all built in that old-fashioned, layered, '50s way of fabrication—with thick tweed houndstooth-check coats and perverse backless pinafore dresses with big, white cartoon buttons. No, this collection also featured acres of real python in permutations so artificial in hue they looked plastic: You can have any color you like as long as it isn't natural."Instinct? I like that word," said Miuccia Prada after her show. For indeed, like all great designers, she is led by her instincts, and these were animal ones on display today. "I wanted to put things together in a naive way, not caring, always wrong, with that attitude of instinct. It started with the mutation of ostrich in Prada, the genetic modification, the idea of a new species."Eras were conflated—'50s-'60s-'70s-'80s-'90s-now—but it was a particular insane view of some sort of '80s New Wave that came roaring through. Talking Heads' Tina Weymouth might have been in a kind of crazed conversation with Lady Di in a valance yoked blouse, oversize flower jewelry, and globs of glitter and patent shoes.
In anybody else's hands this could have been a great, big mess, but in Prada's it was postmodern perfection.While postmodernism now seems rather a nostalgic concept, as Miuccia Prada proves, it is actually more relevant than ever. Except it has mutated and become even more so, even more post, because brands like Prada have embraced this worldview and unashamedly and knowingly run with it, making hyperreality the only reality. Today's collection reveled in the postmodern, the hyperreal, and became the post-pop. And yet, as always in the fashion industry, in fakery there is honesty. Pleasure is our business, indeed—ultimately it is Miuccia Prada's.
11 March 2015
Miu Miu of late tends to be where Miuccia Prada's girliest, most youthful impulses are unleashed. Walking into the Palais d'Iéna for her first-ever formal presentation of the label's Pre-Fall collection—how has she managed to avoid the four-seasons-a-year cycle this long?—the first thing you noticed were the mannequins' Boy Scout kerchiefs and Sherlock Holmes hats. Prada is endorsing walking shorts in a big way this season. They came with boxy plaid camp shirts; structured, slightly shrunken blazers; and capelet coats straight out of Scotland Yard.But it wasn't quite as business-as-unusual as that all sounds. Mixed in amid the more masculine stuff were the sort of retro-quirky prints that once earned Prada her reputation for "ugly chic" and now can be found regularly on the Miu Miu runway. This time they turned up on short dresses with contrasting patch pockets and on thick, fuzzy sweaters that sparkled with Lurex thread. There would be no confusing this collection with her recent Prada men's show, which was almost severe in its sparseness. Case in point: This season's answer to the see-through plastic macs and patchwork candy-colored puffers of Miu Miu seasons past was a trio of glossy crocodile-stamped patent leather raincoats that will doubtless prove irresistible to her fans.
27 January 2015
As a designer and as a person, Miuccia Prada is far from the icy intellectual she is often taken for. And if there is one collection that proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's today's fantastic Miu Miu offering. In it, Prada extolled the virtues of the obnoxious brat, the slut, the bad girl—in short, the virtues of Dawn Davenport, played by Divine in John Waters'Female Trouble, screaming for her cha-cha heels (large bowed mules or gigantic platforms in this case) and unashamedly declaring that she is "a thief and a shitkicker."Female Trouble's theme song—the Divine version, and various covers—was one of the key musical accompaniments to the collection. So was the Shangri-Las' "Past, Present and Future," the spoken-word song by the rebel girl group (and punk inspiration) that is lushly laid over Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata. With the use of that song, the depths and the feminist convictions of this collection, and of Prada herself, were also hinted at: "Go out with you? Why not / Do I like to dance? Of course / Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to / But don't try to touch me, don't try to touch me / 'Cause that will never happen again / Shall we dance?"In the reimagined interior of Auguste Perret's Palais d'Iéna, regular Miu Miu and Prada collaborators OMA designed what could only be described as an arched plywood Protestant church—complete with uncomfortable chairs to pay penance on. "For me it was about chance with this church," said Prada. "I did not know they were designing this, and it is perfect!" Here, the bad girl became badder, more stroppy and surly, more rebellious. "There was no self-censorship," the designer added as she commended John Waters' film, the cover versions ("I always like the idea of copies."), and that recurring item of clothing she is obsessed with: the housecoat. It was here in multiple forms, at its most decadent in Bucol couture fabric, mimicking the commonplace polyester. In fact, the "cover versions" of fabrics were crucial to this collection: These were some of the finest Miuccia Prada has ever used, and they echoed her Spring Prada collection. Here, too, was a stratification of history, but at the service of a more punk purpose. Rich fabrics mimicked poor, reversing the raison d'être of the Spring '13 Miu Miu collection, which is the one this lineup was most like.
But instead of evoking Simone Signoret sashaying around in couture classics made of denim, this collection suggested Divine, Cookie Mueller, and Mink Stole in Baltimore, wearing the richest of hand-woven silk jacquards, like 18th-century-style chiné (seen in the beautiful boudoir pajama suits) and rose-embedded fil coupe, alongside wintry, heavy wools and large grained leather; even the sun got attitude from this Spring collection.Here, Miuccia Prada showed the punk brat with the self-deprecating attitude that she really is—"I am not such a serious person," she laughed—by almost pastiche-ing her own Prada offering. Just as John Waters admired director Douglas Sirk, Prada plays her own John Waters for Miu Miu, with her Douglas Sirk self in charge of the Prada collection. By undercutting, laughing, and asserting her rebellious form of the feminine in fashion she makes a point for today. As the crowds of young front-row starlets gathered around the designer at the end of the show, you couldn't help but laugh that they, too, would be dressed divinely like Divine next season. How subversive is that?
1 October 2014
Miuccia Prada may be a bit late to the party, but it wassomeparty she threw for Miu Miu at the Palais d'Iéna in Paris tonight. Dior, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton held their pre-season extravaganzas nearly two full months ago in May. The last time Prada showed a Resort collection for Miu Miu at all was three years ago, by appointment in London. But not even Mrs. P. can ignore the demand—from stores, from magazines, from her own PR department—for new material anymore.On the eve of the couture shows, Prada staged a Croisière collection of her own, recruiting on-the-rise British singer-songwriter Josephine Oniyama to do three songs during cocktails, and Jack White, who commanded the stage with his band after the three-course Italian dinner. In the crowd: Uma Thurman; Roman Polanski and his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner; the director Steve McQueen; Léa Seydoux;Nymphomaniac's Stacy Martin; Isla Fisher; Douglas Booth; the artist formerly known as Mos Def; Rem Koolhaas; and Marc Jacobs.In between the two performances was the show itself—new material in the form of colorful suede micro-minidresses covered in crystals; mismatched paisley-printed blouses and flares topped with questionable hand-crocheted vests; spiffy, spongy military-button jackets and coats; and a loud, printed pantsuit of the sort seen elsewhere this season. The long, wispy scarves trailing some of the silk tops and dresses were a nice touch. You half wondered if Prada had spent the first part of the summer binge-watching the finale season ofMad Men. Nothing's ever quite that simple with this designer, of course. But befitting the commercial implications of the Resort season, this was one of her more straightforward collections, groovy in its late sixties and early seventies vibes, and just retro enough to appeal to the youthful demographic that is the Miu Miu target audience. It should please all parties. As for the party, it seemed to please Prada quite a bit. She was spotted in the crowd well into Jack White's hour-long, ear-splitting set.
4 July 2014
Miuccia Prada started her personal revolutionary role in the fashion industry with one simple item: a black nylon rucksack. She took the banal, the ordinary, the everyday and made it desirable, luxurious, and special. She started to design and define what luxury could be by the appropriation of the normal. What she presented at Miu Miu today was a continuation of that task. A task and a collection that was so enjoyably witty, subversive, and skewed that it reached new heights of the "avant-bland."Prada frequently returns to normality; she often revels in it. This is not to say that she just presents something desultorily and day-to-day, then shoves it on a catwalk—that's not fashion, after all. Instead she designs, re-contextualizes, and skews. Prada makes you think as well as laugh, and above all she infects you with a desire for quilted nylon from the bottom of your heart. And that's because, well, she has a desire for quilted nylon from the bottom of her heart. "Everybody thought I was crazy with this, with the amount of times we tried getting this right," the designer said of the key fabric of the collection. "I worked for one month on the right windbreaker that was not puffy-puffy. The perfect windbreaker—I had to get it right.""I am fixated on the notion of no useless design," Prada continued. "Ideas are a different thing. But when things are overdone from nothing, I can't stand it; it had to be more real, more wearable, less pretentious. What is normal, what is real, is what is important. In Paris you go slightly more grand, but this time I went, 'Who cares?'"Who cares, indeed. Prada covered the entire Palais d'Iéna in clear plastic, from floor to columns, echoing that Prada code of the clear plastic mac that made a familiar appearance in the collection and was added to by skirts, tops, and boots. The rest of the venue was covered in rough scaffolding; again utilitarian—you sat on it. A mini version of the supportive metal scaffolding poles was formed as heels for shoes. Above all, the designer presented a new kind of Miu Miu girl, one more stripped down and utilitarian than ever before. This was a girl that would not be out of place in the north of England, wearing a ski jacket and a school uniform, eating crisps at a bus stop in 1986, like a Rita or a Sue from an Alan Clarke film. Re-contextualized in this highest of fashion settings, she was aggressively normal, avant-bland, normcore.
Yet as the show progressed, she became more and more extravagant. As Tori Amos' version of "Enjoy the Silence" was replaced by a dance mix of Depeche Mode's original, the girl exploded into quilted brocades that looked to have Lurex running through them, her home knits revealing delicate underwear underneath. Intricate metal appliqués appeared on plastics—the silhouettes were similar, but the fashion came to the fore. Yet you were still left with the lingering impression of the start: the quilted nylons, the windbreakers, and the everyday. "Normalityisweird," said Mrs. Prada. And in fashion, that is undoubtedly true.
4 March 2014
On the final day of a week of Paris shows that saw designers asserting their identities, yet at the same time pushing themselves and going against the grain, we come to the one who is always doing this: Miuccia Prada.In the Miu Miu collection she showed today, she did not disappoint. It was the companion piece to her Prada presentation, in its rebellious view of femininity, yet here, it was the clichés and classics of the feminine that were explored and presented as perverse. "Anything that is classic, a repeat in history, a genre of woman or clothes that always comes about," defined the designer after her show. "Classics, classics of trash, classics of chic, classics of the good girl, classics of the bad girl."These classics ran from the children's coat scaled for the grown woman to the bugle-beaded bustier of the showgirl. "There is the showgirl, Cher. The use of something so trendy now, like that classic cut of a sixties coat, the eighties balloon dress, mixing them all at once," Prada said. Pretty and perverse happened simultaneously, with immaculate wool coats and thick vinyl skirts in off-pastel shades against vivid thick wool tights, the kind that children wear, and boiled sweet Mary Janes. Mischievously sick. A bit like Courtney Love's "kinder whore" period but pristine, taken to the nth degree, with none of the grunge nostalgia. Of course, Love's femininity is yet another classic archetype on repeat.In the spectacularly transformed Palais d'Iéna—altered again by Rem Koolhaas' OMA—different kinds of interior worlds stood for these versions of femininity all at once. They ranged from the children's room, with its pussycat wallpaper—a design to be found on jacquards, prints, and embroideries on both clothes and boots—to the classic Milanese parquet flooring, Perspex seating, and shelving—echoed in the chokers worn by the models—to the gigantic Panton chandelier."I asked myself, What is classic? Why does it become classic?" explained Prada. "People think that it is romance, but that's not it—it is something instinctive. Why do women like pink and bows? I am always very intrigued by what attracts people so much."Prada enjoys presenting something slightly off. Underneath a candy coating there is often a lurking sense of something wrong.
She is frequently hailed as the intellectual fashion designer—but this is almost damning and marginalizing for someone who enjoys slipping infectious ideas into the mainstream and ultimately works so brilliantly on instinct. Her aim is always to connect to her audience on an immediate level. That's why what she presents registers with people so readily, not only in the mind but in the gut as well, with a slight current of sickness and misapprehension underneath. That attraction and repulsion makes her output even more seductive, of course. Prada anticipates, giving people what they want—but not what they think they want.
1 October 2013
There has been a great deal of soul-searching and introspection going on by certain designers during these collections. In France, for one, it seems that they have been asking themselves, What constitutes Paris Fashion, after all? For them, the answer is not marketing, a sole interest in profit margins, or the number of likes on Facebook, but a sense of daring, freedom, skill, and fun that quite simply connects with people who would like to buy and wear their clothes. Strangely, many of these designers are not French, yet they are intimately linked to fashion in Paris and what it symbolizes. And it was up to an Italian, Miuccia Prada, to bring Paris fashion week to a close with a Miu Miu show that was a paean to all of those things, but mainly to the notion of the freedom and fun of French Fashion with a capitalF.She presented once more at the Palais d'Iena, but the venue had been altered again by Rem Koolhaas' OMA—the people behind the Prada set pieces. Slicing the show space in half, raising the floor and lowering the ceiling with industrial grid-like grates—this intervention in the building had an idea of "cutting through the past," as the designer explained afterward. As the lights were switched off and strip lights flickered on, the Eurythmics' "This City Never Sleeps" was played, and with its continual rumbling of subway trains, the show began.A polka-dotted neckerchief, a jacket with a double sailor collar—one in navy wool under one in black astrakhan—with a calf-skimming skirt, stripy stockings and telltale shoes, all was at once old and new. That tailored hourglass shape hinted at the belle epoque, the end of the nineteenth century, or maybe the end of the twentieth, in its cartoony intent. As the looks continued—those sailor collars, the building of stripes and the spots, the flashing of the tops of stockings, the inclusion of sportswear and those continuous, sinuous lines and lengths—it appeared this was a reimagined Gigi for today, and also one that reminded you of yesterday. "Those stripy stockings have different associations," said Prada. "From prostitute to schoolgirl," she laughed.They also hinted at the last time French fashion felt truly free, fun, and full of life: when Mr. Gaultier ruled in the late eighties and the beginning of the nineties—of the twentieth century this time.
5 March 2013
As the curtains were closed at the Palais d'Iéna for the last blockbuster show of the season, you knew something special was about to happen. For starters, there were curtains at the windows—something never experienced before at this venue, a place that is usually bathed in natural light. There was also a complex wooden set designed by Rem Koolhaas' OMA. Merely the evidence that Miu Miu had cut through such a massive amount of French bureaucracy—this is a government-affiliated building—showed that the label meant business. These are the pyrotechnics usually reserved for Prada shows.The dark setting, the smoky lighting, the jazz trumpet opening, featuring snatches of "Miles and Miles of Miles Davis" by Malcolm McLaren—it was the kind of ambience usually reserved for a French femme fatale of the fifties. And the first looks? All dark denim.That dark denim was one of those simple statements Miuccia Prada presents that just has a strangely profound resonance for a collection. The shapes might have been those of fifties couture classics, but that dark denim was the contemporary touch of a contemporary house. But to add to the perversity, "All of the denim was lined in duchesse satin," the designer explained after her show, with some glee. That is, after all, the quintessential couture fabric, relegated here to a mere—very expensive—lining; a decadent motif in the extreme. "I was trying to be very elegant in a very different way," Prada continued. "It was not about destroying elegance, but achieving a different kind. There was a mixture of the rich and the poor fabrics, a manipulation of fabric and material to mean something else." She added: "The femme fatale is never perfect…at least the ones I like."What Miuccia Prada presented today was about the opposite of perfection. Grand yet effortless, and with ease—that ease, again, that is on the side of the slattern this season. This was a workwear femme fatale, with a hands-on dishabille wardrobe: Furs were tie-dyed and casually slung over shoulders, or they were vast; evening coats that were oversize, creased, and crumpled—this time in that characteristic duchesse satin—were given the same tie-dyed treatment, almost appearing like massive stains. It was a contemporary updating of the kind of clothes Simone Signoret might sashay around in. She was, after all, often typecast as a good-time girl.
At the same time, this was not a retro collection; the layering of history in those rich and poor fabrics was used to arrive at the point of today. Like the music of the presentation, it was a sampling that showed the way to something else. Malcolm McLaren's reworking of Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No. 3" through the eyes of Miles Davis, spliced alongside Neneh Cherry's version of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin"? As Miuccia Prada is oft likely to say: It's complicated. Like McLaren himself, she is a kind of big-business punk impresario. And while she might change her style, her signature always remains the same. The ideas may be complex, but this is her unerring knack: She always makes it look easy.
2 October 2012
The big message at Miu Miu was pantsuits. "After years of skirts, they're the one thing I find exciting at the moment," Miuccia Prada said after her show. She wore the black astrakhan two-piecer with the purple crystals that Magdalena Frackowiak modeled in her Prada show two weeks ago. Fresh off his own second show of the season, Marc Jacobs offered her congratulations and told her how great she looked.On the runway, the cuts were more butch: Oversize men's jackets and high-waisted floods were paired with seventies collared shirts, frilly ties, and clashing ascots, and came accessorized with chunky belts and even chunkier loafers. As for the suit fabrics, they ranged from street-ready solids with a bit of a sharkskin sheen to only-for-the-bravest Art Nouveau-ish florals. Some jackets had this season's capelike back.Will Miuccia's pantsuits generate excitement in Miu Miu fans? Tough to say; they love their dresses. Then again, the matching-print pantsuit is one of Fall's key trends. Either way, the show ended with an insurance plan: tiny A-line dresses affixed with mirrored appliqués big enough to see your reflection in.
6 March 2012
Talk about a volte-face. At the beginning of Milan, Miuccia Prada made a play for sweetness with zippy car-print dresses, retro maillots, and high-heeled sandals with tail fins. Today at Miu Miu, she opened with a model who let's just say doesn't belong to the Natasha Poly school of good looks, wearing a black blouse wrapped with a shape-obscuring matching stole across the chest and a plain gray A-line skirt. Hollywood to hausfrau in less than two weeks.Afterward, she made a point about designing the collection in the "15 days" (13 by our count) since her Prada show. "I tried to do something different." Tried and succeeded. Though there were some overlaps—midriff-baring bra tops made a reappearance, as did lace—the emotions the two collections produced were quite dissimilar. There was at once something folksy about Miu Miu and slightly cold. As the show progressed, though, she added color (oxblood, cherry red, cerulean blue) as well as festive prints. There was nothing to quite raise the temperature like those Marilyn Monroe bathing suits in Milan, but we can see fans warming to the stiff lace tent dresses here or a patchwork print skirt worn with a clashing print top. The leather intaglio mules and boots will be street-style fodder, no doubt.Still, there's no one like Prada for keeping us on our toes.
4 October 2011
In keeping with Miu Miu's congenital oddity, the 21 looks of the label's Resort collection revisit the dressed-up excesses of the late 1980's with an overdose of tongue-in-cheek irony. You can only wonder what It Girls of the Here and Now will make of Memphis-printed puffball skirts, a peplumed coat-dress in red duchesse satinfor day, and extravagant overloads of pearl necklaces, rhinestone-studded headbands, and powder blue lace gloves. Maybe they'll get the joke. That would certainly be the Prada way.The style of the Lacroix lady was subverted here with a girly rock 'n' roll irreverence. Sure, a cropped jacket was lavished with pearls and beading and more pearls trimmed the Peter Pan collar of its accompanying blouse, but the outfit was completed with an athletic barely-there onesie. The stark contrast made it seem as though a look that started out with a hint of the extreme had been pushed even further. That felt like the key to the collection. Hence, a fuchsia-checked dress with pouf sleeves and an even pouf-ier short skirt. Or the bowed and ruffled sundress, also super-short, with a flower-embroidered, cabled cardigan buttoned at the throat—a haute bourgeois finishing touch that was something Miu Miu's Resort collection shared with its big sister Prada. Also crossing over was the sheer black lace, worn with nude underwear. But where it looked seriously adult at Prada, it stayed resolutely playful at Miu Miu, thanks to the overload of sparkly accessories. The optimism of youth, the decadence of excess—unlikely reconciliations are also the Miuccia way.
13 July 2011
Hailee Steinfeld, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mila Kunis sat front-row at Miu Miu, but on the runway Miuccia Prada has moved on from last season's fascination with the cult of contemporary celebrity. Instead she offered a study of the forties, right down to the models' matte red lips and the combs holding back their hair. With its striking views of Le Tour d'Eiffel, architect Auguste Perret's 1937 Palais d'Iéna, which has never before been opened for a fashion show, proved a fitting backdrop for a modern vintage collection that transported us back to World War II-era Paris. (Marc Jacobs also touched on the era at Louis Vuitton today.)Back then, of course, women would've worn stockings with their bold-shouldered, inverted-triangle jackets, or at the very least a pencil skirt. But here bare legs put the show's glitter-dipped sandal booties with their curving heels in sharp relief. Dresses were slim, long-sleeved, and to-the-knee and came printed with birds or white flowers like lilies of the valley and daisies. For evening, those same prints were picked out in sequins. Mink swagged the shoulders of little black dresses and, a bit more trickily, twisted around the hips of others. The models carried clutches that looked like blown-up versions of coin purses.Afterward, someone observed that Prada looked like Miu Miu this season and vice versa. Suffice it to say that this was one of the designer's most elegant Miu Miu collections ever.
8 March 2011
What was theAmerican Idolopening music doing on Miu Miu's soundtrack? And what exactly was the meaning of the elevated red painted wooden dance floor? Miuccia Prada put it quite simply after the show: "I was thinking about everybody's obsession with being famous."There was nothing so garish here as spangledDancing With the Stars-type costumes. But while Prada insisted there was "no nostalgia" to the collection, you could pick up a sort of bygone innocence to the dominant silhouette—a long-sleeved, shirtwaist silk satin dress with good-girl box pleats. Any such feeling, however, was quickly subverted by the Sunset Strip Day-Glo brights and Walk of Fame star prints (and matching appliqués on big-shouldered leather jackets). The snakes twisting up and down tree branches were darker still, but there were elegant swans and exotic lotus flowers—symbols of grace and rebirth, respectively—in equal measure. So perhaps Mrs. Prada isn't quite ready to come down on either side of our culture's addiction to fame.It's worth noting that the young stars Dakota Fanning and Mia Wasikowska were both in the audience. Either of them would look winning in the black cotton dresses with leather latticework at the neckline.
5 October 2010
"Fun, sensual, insolent." Miuccia Prada's prescription for Miu Miu's Resort collection nailed its naughty little heart. The clothes were inspired by lingerie shapes and lingerie fabrics like crepe de chine, satin, and sable, but there was another story, too. Prada's undying reverence for Yves Saint Laurent is a strong strand of her design DNA, and there were echoes of YSL's notorious 1971 collection, the one that was scandalously inspired by the shady ladies of Paris in the early 1940's. That old-time raciness was reflected in the "come hither" neon brightness of Miu Miu's color palette, carried over into armfuls of bracelets, and prints of apples and hearts whose cuteness was cut by the fact that they were slightly blurred, like a neon sign.The languid line of a keyhole-neckline crepe dress or the masculine/feminine flared, cuffed cotton drill pants paired with a fitted military jacket could have been out of Dietrich's closet (her again!), except that the designer preferred the more playful, less ambiguous comedienne Carole Lombard as a reference. "Keep things simplest" is Miuccia's new mantra. Word to the lookbook: one of the most seductive re-creations yet of the glamorous harpies who ruled the pages ofVogue Parisin the heady seventies. As far as the historical references go, Miuccia's convinced nobody remembers anything anyway, which means that Miu Miu fans will find irresistibly colored clothes in proportions that look sexy and new to them.
27 June 2010
If her Prada collection, with its emphasis on the bust, was a sexual come-on, Miuccia Prada's Miu Miu show was about romance—at least on its pre-Summer of Love sixties surface. The narrow, short silhouette made an erogenous zone of twiggy legs elongated by square-toed pumps. Sleeveless shifts came with high, chin-scraping collars, some accented with thin, floppy bows; other dresses blossomed below the waist and were cinched with large turnkey closures (the better to preserve the innocence of the girls who wore them, perhaps). An abundance of silver rosettes dotting the front and circling the hem of coats added to the sweet Mary Quant-ish vibe.But this wouldn't be a Miu Miu show without a little—or a lot of—provocation. Pinafore dresses with plunging U-fronts were worn with bandeaux that exposed the flesh under the breasts; shifts had cutouts at the ribs; and miniskirts flipped up suggestively at the outer thighs. All of this was done in fabrics that had an odd, incongruous solidity.The linear, Edie Sedgwick, pre-hippie sixties have been popping up with increasing frequency as the Fall season comes to a close. This collection put Prada squarely in the center of things, but, as usual, with her signature perverse twist.
9 March 2010
If you didn't already know that Miuccia Prada thinks of Miu Miu as an expression of her inner girl, you'd probably be able to guess it from the label's pre-fall collection. With its narrow-shouldered plaid jackets, tiny little matching skirts, and girly knee-high knit socks, it had a sincere feel for the nymphet dolly birds who populated long-forgotten pop flicks likeJoannaandThe Touchablesback when Prada was in her teens. It wasn't only the abbreviated proportions of the tops and skirts—or their school uniform-y correctness—where the sixties made their presence felt. Pants were narrow-cut, flared, and cuffed—very Miss London. And the wool used is apparently, in Italy at least, irrevocably associated with that decade. But nothing is ever so literal in Pradaworld. To anyone who couldn't care less what girls wore Back Then, the re-proportioned duffel/parka hybrids were an adorable now-ish take on outerwear. Anyway, mixing time and place is a Prada specialty, and it was more forties glam than sixties pop that insinuated itself into the collection's use of fur (as tippetlike collars or as the sleeves on a jacket) or into the leopard-printed sheepskin jacket.As an alternative to lace, there were handcrafted cable-knit dresses to match the mittens and knee socks that paired with everything (including the buckled stilettos). These summed up the girlish spirit of the collection, except when a shaggy fur tunic was thrown over one knit dress, mixing the pure and the pagan. The belted closings on that tunic had buckles that locked, the same hardware used to close the jackets on Miu Miu's correct little suits. Were they Prada's perverse, playful revisioning of a twenty-first-century chastity belt? In thisTwilightera, the idea ain't so crazy.
28 January 2010
As Paris winds down, one of the city's big stories is its designers' fascination with youth. Leave it to that Italian iconoclast Miuccia Prada to crystallize it in an oddly captivating collection that combined short, high-waisted Lolita dresses with naïve animal prints (and one not-so-G-rated lounging-nude motif). "I was questioning innocence, questioning youth," Prada said backstage. "What do they mean today in a world that's the opposite?"She is a designer who's always embraced the perverse, so about halfway through, the cat and bird and dog prints got some company in the form of holographic paillettes and crystals embroidered on sheer nude mesh insets. These, along with cutouts that bared skin on the torso, upped the provocation factor on the little-girl frocks, but it was still hard to imagine fashion sophisticates like Kate Moss and Renée Zellweger, who sat opposite each other in the front row, finding many occasions to wear them.In the end, Prada's final judgment on our age-obsessed culture wasn't entirely clear, but it's interesting to note that the best looks in this quirky, challenging collection were the pantsuits. With their sophisticated, narrow lines, they didn't quite fit into this season's naïf narrative. But they did make playing grown-up look like a lot of fun.
6 October 2009
It's been a while since Miu Miu could simply be regarded as Prada's little sister, and further proof of that came with a full-blown Resort show in the label's recently opened 57th Street boutique, complete with uniformed waiters passing drinks before the parade. This line has a well-developed subversive streak, of course, and one of Resort's main tropes was to take the maillot shape and repurpose it in the form of halter tops (worn with rah-rah skirts) or printed sheer chiffon leotards. Those wouldn't cut it in the office pool, but we might test the waters with a blue and red number with a girlish crisscross back, or one of the plainer pastel ensembles featuring attractive jeweled hardware. Cape-backed dresses, which bore a relation to Prada's Resort silhouette, will offer urbanites a welcome alternative to air-conditioning.
2 June 2009
Miuccia Prada wrapped up fashion month with a compelling Miu Miu collection that, like more than a few others this season, felt quintessentially Parisian. With bits and pieces fromHistoire d'O, Visconti'sConversation Piece, and Fassbinder and Antonioni films on the soundtrack, it tried to answer the question, "What's the bourgeoisie now?" Or so the designer explained backstage, adding, "they were different kinds of femmes fatales."The opening coat-dresses, most of them sleeveless, were worn half unbuttoned, exposing flesh-toned brassieres. Either that, or the dresses were draped in back, revealing bare expanses of skin a-shimmer from light dustings of iridescent glitter. A strategically draped long scarf edged in fur, meanwhile, might stand in for a missing shirt. Prada sent out coats and dresses made from what could've been upholstery fabric salvaged from the tony Avenue Foch manse where the show was held, then moved on to looks that paired filmy silk blouses with long, narrow skirts (the most striking combination came in turquoise and ruby). Toward the end, she put aside the underwear fetish that was a through line with her signature collection (in Milan it was red briefs) to show sleeveless shells and skirts in silk crepe embroidered with large, colorful gems.The nude bras, furry heels, and paillette-covered kneesocks gave the vaguely seventies-feeling clothes an erotic subtext. But sexually charged undercurrents aside, what this Miu Miu outing boiled down to was a collection of great-looking, salable coats.
11 March 2009
As far as pre-fall's concerned, Miu Miu's Greek-inspired Spring collection looks like ancient history. There's nothing left of the ready-holed linen and pleating, only a reiteration of the luxe values the line has acquired these days. Lots of fur, in the form of long-haired gilets and jackets, is involved, along with long dresses or skirts in caramel or rose faille with a bunchy waistline further emphasized by quirky stick-up pockets. Mildly more playful than the Prada line (angora berets, legwarmers with elastic stirrups to slip under shoes), this collection is nevertheless further evidence of how far Miu Miu has distanced itself from its initial reputation as a girly, accessible label.
10 February 2009
"It's an investigation of our history, of our European past." With that big idea in mind, Miuccia Prada sent out a focused collection of nipped-waist dresses, as well as tops and skirts in pleated burlap or silk, most of them layered with a low, hip-slung apron. Sometimes the fabrics were dotted with fraying holes, as if moths had descended and started munching en masse. Other times it looked as if spray-paint artists had gotten their hands on them, dipping the ridges of a pleated brown frock in a rusty red or scrawling graffiti squiggles across the front of a skirt.The history part came in with prints that looked like painted Roman tiles; they magnified as the show progressed so that faces in profile eventually abstracted into random assemblages of square dots. They made for an interesting juxtaposition with the images on the walls of the Avenue Foch mansion, which provided a look at Miu Miu's own roots in the form of Warhol-esque screen prints of ad-campaign stars including Lindsay Lohan, Kim Basinger, and Kirsten Dunst (who was in the audience).Prada's perforated tops and skirts last season have proved to be quite influential (witness all the laser-cut materials on Spring's runways). So—who knows?—maybe there's hope for bulky burlap and aprons. But in an uncertain future, the odds look better for the less-challenging and sexier silk numbers.
4 October 2008
Lace made for a fascinating fetish object at the Prada show in Milan last week. At her little-sister label, Miuccia Prada fixated on, of all things, jockey uniforms. "I wanted to take sport in a new direction," she said afterward. The show began in quite literal fashion with a jumpsuit of bold, color-blocked primary silks, worn over bare legs and cone-shaped heels. Each model's initials were embroidered in leather letters above her left breast, and each wore a fitted horse hood that snapped below her chin, along with a full face of makeup.From there, the races-to-runway uniform morphed into densely knit blouson sweaters over long shorts and duchesse-satin tunics and track jackets that topped straight skirts. In a stroke of parallelism between her two collections, Prada showed narrow, laser-cut felt shifts and dresses in graphic floral or chevron lace that offered hide-and-seek peeks of the stretch-jersey bodysuits in contrasting colors underneath. For evening, the lace became matte sequins.Coming at the tail end of a month of shows, the sports reference seemed curiously off-subject. Maybe that's just Miuccia, always a few steps ahead. Still, all the horseplay and repetitive pursuit of concept did seem to come at the cost of real-life clothes. That impression was only partly allayed by the closing group of shapely solid-colored dresses and coats.
1 March 2008
What doSwan Lakedancers, sumo wresters, a girl in a French-maid costume, Playboy Bunnies, and a Burning Man festivalgoer have in common? Not much, unless you're Miuccia Prada. For Spring, she said she was thinking about "life as theater, and all the clichés of how people represent themselves in the world." So, videos and photographs of these and numerous other characters were projected onto screens as her models wound their way through the baroque rooms of an Avenue Foch mansion.As for the clothes themselves, they seemed to pull most inspiration from the ballerinas and the French maids on those screens. The silhouette was scandalously short. Fitted sleeveless blouses, some with inset bibs-cum-dickeys, blossomed out at the waistline as a tutu might and stopped just short of the upper thighs, where little-girl bloomers or a fitted mini were peeking out from underneath the top's hem. This look came in many variations—metallic lamés, tiny tiers of ruffles in black or cream, prim organza—and when Miuccia diverged from it, it was with a sculptural hip-length cape over silky short shorts or a multicolor striped jumpsuit that had echoes of her Prada show. Similarly, the illustrated harlequins and Pierrots that decorated brocades were relatives of the fairies at Miu Miu's big sister.How does it all relate to the sheer, mumsy-ish polyester suits hanging in the label's stores now? In the sense that what we saw today was young and sexy, it doesn't. But the collection had this in common with last season's: It was subtly perverse (and given the kink factor, destined to divide opinion). At Miu Miu, that seems to be just the way Prada likes it.
7 October 2007
Fifties fit-and-flare silhouettes mingled with pajama ensembles of a more 1930's vintage in Miu Miu's playful, irreverent, but undeniably chic resort collection. A bubblegum-pink prom dress was paired with a modest cream cardigan and bobby socks and heels, while tie-print shorts dipped below the hem of a matching nipped-waist dress. As for the more boyish pj's (which also, as it turns out, made appearances at Miuccia Prada's resort collection and in her Spring 2008 men's show), they were softened by girlish touches like delicate pintucking.
9 July 2007
Miu Miu sometimes gets her kicks from being at odds with big sister Prada, but this season, the two were in sync when they offered a stretched seventies silhouette for their tailoring, narrow in the thigh, slightly flared at the ankle. The effect was amplified at Miu Miu by a two-buttoned jacket that closed high on the chest: A simple detail, but it effectively elongated the torso and made for a more formal look. This being Miu Miu, the formality was promptly undercut by cropped trousers and sandals that looked like a hippie version of Scottish gillies, worn with a thick sock (of course) to compound the slightly adolescent gawkiness that Miuccia relishes in her Miu Miu boys. In the past, she's mentioned that this collection is infused with a nostalgic spirit—a recalled memory of other times—and that idea was evident in tops that were piped like pajamas or collarless like old-school baseball shirts. The caps might have been worn by Boy Scouts in the 1920s.And it was that same decade that could have produced the silky chinoiserie-style shirt-and-pant combos (OK, let's call them pajamas) that were a variant on a central idea from Miuccia Prada's own collection. One of the foundations of the collection was the idea that the clothes should look old but well-cared-for. So the suiting fabrics were treated to appear worn, shirts were faded along imagined folds, ties were stitched together from pieces of other ties (in numbered, limited editions, so mind the carbonara sauce). It's such attention to arcane detail that captures the imagination and makes clothes a little more than, well, clothes. And it's why we love Miuccia.
24 June 2007
This was an intentionally conceptual show, but it started simply enough: The first look out was a camel suit with a slightly nipped waist and rounded hips over a pleated knee-length skirt—its girth perhaps a little exaggerated—worn with knee socks and spectator pumps.From there, however, the molded shapes turned more pronounced, almost old-ladyish, in fact…. And then came the provocatively sheer, flesh-tone metallic twinsets and skirts…followed by rubbery leather coats in lipstick pinks and reds.Miuccia Prada returned her attention to the natural/synthetic dichotomy that informed her Prada show (and many other designers' this season), with the accent falling heavily this time on the man-made. In reality, those A-line coats were 100 percent real leather, but lined with neoprene to look spongy and fake.What was her point? "It's a vision of what's happening in the world right now with women," she said after the show. "On videos and TV all of the women look fake. I wanted to show this plasticized vision, but filtered through classic pieces and sticking to tradition."This translated to jackets and pants cut from a Lurex-shot quilted fabric that looked like nothing so much as your old granny's polyester housecoat (and appeared just as flammable). Cardigans and V-necks were tucked into the top of nude pantyhose, the waistbands of which were exposed above low-slung skirts. Strapless dresses came with deflated, folded-over bra cups, as if to suggest they would only fit correctly if filled with pneumatic silicone breasts.Despite all the (matron-meets-) porn-star allusions, this wasn't a sexy collection. And it won't necessarily be easy to wear, either. But in her characteristically thoughtful style, Prada has given everyone plenty to ponder on their long plane ride home.
3 March 2007
Miu Miu menswear is something of a paradox at the moment: The more focused and distinctive the collection becomes, the harder it is to find. Parent Prada cryptically promises "big projects" in the years ahead, but this season Miuccia opted for a tightly edited showroom presentation that was an intimate as a Tupperware party. It allowed for an appreciation of the subtleties of the clothing in a way that recalled the coziness of a couture salon. In fact, the word "couture" came up, as an analogy for traditionally luxe menswear fabrics (navy and camel cashmere, wool and silk blends) used in an extremely experimental cut like the ergonomic trouser shape. The opposite also applied—technical materials used in classic cuts, namely an evening coat or a marronnier cut from neoprene.But the essence of the collection was the hybridized formality that has been one of Milan's biggest stories this season. Almost everything was worn with a dressy white piqué-collared shirt or a version in blue banker's stripe, while the shoes were a patent leather marriage of wingtip and boxing boot. Actually, Miu Miu's signature spirit of willful youth lingered on in that combination (as it did in cropped corduroys, skinny jackets, or the cropped, double-breasted hooded cardigan jacket), but there was a newly adult flare to a navy cashmere overcoat or a sleek leather caban with technical detailing, suggesting that one of those future "big projects" is likely to be a concerted reintroduction of this brand on a much bigger scale.
18 January 2007
Closing Paris fashion week in suitably grand style, Miuccia Prada presented her Miu Miu show at a private mansion at 34 Avenue Foch that dates to 1854 and is decorated in Louis XVI style. But it wasn't the nineteenth or eighteenth century she had on her mind when she began thinking about spring. Rather, she was considering Russian constructivism, as well as the elegance of an elongated line.That meant duchesse satin shirts and tunics color blocked in shades of navy, black, and wine, worn with high-waisted tapering pants. Dresses with touches of Africa (tribal prints) and Japan (origami-like folds of shiny fabric decorating the shoulder or hip) fell below the knee. But unlike the body-limning sheaths at Prada, with which this collection seemed to share a spirit, these—while narrow—were A-line. Shorter dresses, some in ribbed knits, came with drop waists pleated to mid-thigh.The motif that held these all together was a tiny rounded collar. And there was more action at the neckline in the form of halter straps from which triangular and circular shapes were suspended to create graphic tops. What Prada offered with this sharp, 30-piece collection was a rebuke to the baby-doll dresses that have dominated the runways this season, and for that, praise is in order. It won't be a surprise when her high waists and slim shapes start appearing in the collections of her designer admirers.
7 October 2006
There's usually at least a nodding acquaintance between Miu Miu and the main Prada line, but this season the two collections couldn't have been more different. That was Miuccia Prada's way of addressing the dueling directions in which she sees civilization going. If the Prada collection reflected a techno-dominated cybersociety, she imagined Miu Miu at the forefront of a back-to-nature survivalist ethos.The show certainly projected a desert island vibe, from the reggae on the sound track to the worn, sun-bleached fabrics and the mostly subtle hints of ethnic dressing (the overtness of an electric-blue sarong pant was the exception not the rule). The designer, who wore a sunshine-yellow dress for her final bow, claimed she wanted to convey the notion of people making do with what our society might leave behind, which accounted for the patchwork shirts, the raggedy-hemmed tops, and the headgear, a cap and do-rag combo.Still, this brand of survivalism wasn't all about roughing it. High-buttoning jackets and paperbag-waisted trousers suggested desert island disco (or at least one of those New Wave fashion moments that Miu Miu—both the woman and the label—delights in). And a linen shorts suit would make any nature boy look chic.
28 June 2006
"To make Miu Miu more special and important" was Miuccia Prada's post-show explanation for taking her diffusion collection to Paris. Andspecialthe small Sunday afternoon presentation at the famous Left Bank restaurant Laperouse was. There were mismatched chairs arrayed against the carved wood walls of its many intimate salons, chocolates and coffee on offer, and ashtrays at the ready. The clothes, too, were elevated, thanks to what the designer described as couture touches: Silk was photo-printed with still lifes that resembled those on the eatery's walls, brocade was hand-painted with fleur-de-lis motifs, and the arms of techno-fabric shrunken jackets came in fox.The Miu Miu girl, Prada said, is the same as her big sister, only a little more angelic. There was a youthful innocence to the models' white eyelashes, their schoolgirl uniforms, and their impossibly brief lampshade skirts. But provocation was at play as well, evident in the fine downy knits (worn alone or under bustier dresses or spilling off shoulders), in the matte red lipstick, and in the Mia Farrow lullaby fromRosemary's Babythat piped through the speakers. The "strength" the designer cited in describing her signature line was less obvious here, but it could be located in military-inspired jackets, some with subtle peplums, and chunky oxford shoes studded with rivets and spikes. Another way the collections related was in Miu Miu's newly luxe, expensive-looking fabrics. Prices will increase, which won't please everyone, but they'll go a long way toward reinforcing Prada's message about the brand's importance.
4 March 2006
David Sylvian's sonorous tones crooned the dark, waltz-timedNight Porteron the soundtrack, invoking images of a Mittel Europa-isch world out of time. It's a place Miuccia Prada has visited before. This trip, however, she opted for a more monochrome approach than usual. "This is my childhood," she stated after the show. "I grew up wearing Tyrolean clothes." But there was little sense of youthful playfulness in the outfits—the worn-looking gray suit, the loden coat and trousers, the high-waisted houndstooth jacket—that made their way down the catwalk. The models, on the other hand, were so young that some seemed to be having trouble mustering the strength to raise feet shod in huge studded hiking boots.The Austro-Hungarian influence seeped through in epauletted coats and stirruped pants, both of which suggested boy riders at a military academy. The green suede breeches and the trousers tucked into boots also had an equestrian flavor. Heraldry resurfaced from Miuccia's signature show earlier in the week in the form of a pop-bright print on a shirt as well as a cluster of badge-like attachments for shirts and caps. Boy scouts perhaps? Fingerless gloves and skinny-rib knits so fine they were almost sheer sealed the sense that these were clothes for callow youths.Miuccia twinkled at the thought that there might be a strand of decadence in the collection, but it was really innocence that was on show here.
19 January 2006
Look to Miu Miu for a quick-fire, instantly wearable synthesis of what's going on in the mind of Miuccia Prada—plus a fantastic array of shoes. Quick on the heels of her main-line thesis on new wider and looser proportions, Prada didn't miss a beat—her Miu Miu collection was right there with the short, roomy, falling-off-the-shoulder dresses and all the big, glittery, Deco-ed up platforms a girl could want.The cartoony ideas Prada cited for her signature label turned up as irregular starbursts popping randomly across little A-line dresses in lemon or pink, and then playfully applied to the riveting high-heel platform shoes. Also attracting attention along the way: the big, wide-set solid-black shoulder straps, from which to dangle a summer dress—another crucial seasonal detail directly transmitted from her grown-up show.Not to say that Miu Miu was a clone. Its personality was indelibly creased, like the strange results of a botched dry-cleaning job, into its cheerfully cheap lining-fabric surfaces. Neat, inside-out pressed denims, striped shirting coats and smocks, and a trend-hitting passage of sixties dresses and coats in oversize eyelet had their own groove going on, too. Still, let's not pretend: The gorgeously mad, funky footwear was the star of this parade.
29 September 2005
It felt like the early '80s all over again. Giorgio Moroder was on the soundtrack; pointy shoes and square-shouldered, shiny suits were on the catwalk, with jacket sleeves pushed up the way Duran Duran used to wear them. A graphic for a top and a tie looked suspiciously like Karl Lagerfeld as seen by Patrick Nagel, the artist who designed the album sleeve for Simon LeBon and Company'sRio. And the naive star pattern that surfaced at Prada's signature show earlier in the week reappeared here in a sharper, more sophisticated form, derived from the motifs of Memphis, the furniture designers who ruled Milan in the first half of the '80s.According to Miuccia herself, though, the crux of the collection was "a white T-shirt and gray pants"—in other words, a palette-cleansing simplicity. But you can't build a whole show on that. So the T-shirt and pants were surrounded by other statements, like the collarless shirts with tiny tab closings (which emphasized her boyish models' youthful necks) and the sleeveless shirts (which emphasized youthful arms) and the not-quite-matching jacket-and-trouser combos (the top would be dull, the bottom shiny, or vice versa, and they'd be a few tones out color-wise). These were actually a pretty accurate reflection of the way real kids in any era dress up.
30 June 2005
With her slightly ratted bouffant pony tail, net head scarf, and existentially hip early-sixties clothes, the Miu Miu girl has turned beatnik—sort of—for fall. She showed up, first of all, in a camel checked cape, white shirt, neat black A-line skirt, and chunky patent platform sandals—plain, neat, and intelligent.She's also instantly recognizable: a stock character who wanders the Prada universe picking up vintage pieces to put together in her dowdy/clever way. She has a collection of Mongolian-lamb wraps and coats with big shaggy collars, as well as paisley-printed skirts, dresses, and coats from that early, mumsy, psychedelic period. She also has a taste for drab knits and dubious suede patchwork in mustard and purple. And her tendency to spike things up with a black leather and chrome chain belt, or a studded bag, indicates a slight propensity for rocker-girl moodiness.This collection served to reiterate Miuccia Prada's love of what she's often called "banal" clothes. The familiarity of it all didn't push fashion in any new direction; many of these clothes are out there already, in vintage stores and, not least, Miu Miu shops. But in a dull cycle of Milan shows, it stood out pretty well.
23 February 2005
Miuccia Prada, as everyone knows, is contrary by nature. She likes things she doesn't like. For example, after this week's Miu Miu men's show, she was saying how much she alwayshatedsuede but how this season shelovedit. Which was most certainly the truth.Suede dominated the collection, in mitteleuropa shades like tan, dark brown, and the deepest blue-green. The echoes of Prada's highly influential bourgeois-lady collections of last year were absolutely deliberate. There was an unorthodox feminine thread running through the styling, which was most obvious in the way everything—from a purple duffel coat to a stolid tweed suit—was belted. Some of those belts were chain, recalling Chanel (even though they were actually dog leads), and there were also chain handles on the suede satchels that a few of the models carried. Shirts printed with patchwork designs, meanwhile, were reminiscent either of a collage of silk ties or of the blouses you might see on Viennese hausfraus.Odd though it may sound, there was a richness and texture throughout that matched the projected backdrop of kaleidoscopic images generated by a complex digital collaboration between Prada and architect Rem Koolhaas's think tank, AMO. Equally appropriate was the soundtrack, which used songs from an old Brian Eno album calledBefore and After Science.What came through in this collection was Miuccia's understanding that, before and after science, there is emotion.
19 January 2005
It was short (hemline-wise), sweet, and unencumbered with any responsibility for changing the direction of fashion. And that's just the way Miu Miu, Prada's secondary line, ought to stand in relation to its older, more intellectual sister collection. For spring, the younger sibling has gone crazy over early seventies geometric prints—either the brown and beige patterns typical of English charity-shop coffee sets, or Marimekko-style florals in purple, blue, and red.What Miu Miu might lack in its limited message—it was all fresh faces, orange lipstick, and girlish cheerfulness—it makes up for in breadth of stock. Waffle knits turned up as Empire-line sweater dresses, while checked shirts became tiny dresses, tied under the bust with knitted belts. The shoes—long, low Mary Janes or high stalking pumps, in orange and emerald—chimed perfectly with the bright, colorful patents that have been turning up as flashes of sixties moderne all over Milan.As simple and carefree as all this may seem, Miuccia Prada is also being careful to pass her best-selling ideas on to Miu Miu for another season's enjoyment. Her jewelry-as-embellishment idea is now manifest, at a more accessible price, in the encrusted beaded necklines on dresses and in the panels applied to shantung jackets. All proof that Ms. Prada is a natural fashion democrat.
1 October 2004
The giveaway was the first shirt on the Miu Miu catwalk, the one with the big magic mushroom. Perhaps Miuccia Prada herself had had a little nibble, because what followed was positively psychedelic. As her signature line's younger sibling, Miu Miu has always represented a certain spirit of reckless youth and freedom for Prada—and this season she took that attitude on a trip. It wasn't just the mushrooms. There were also banana motifs (for those who remember the mellow-yellow sixties), little Indian mirrors all over shirts and ties, and the huge eyes of an Eastern deity staring out from chests and backs. And don't forget the flower-appliquéd flat cap and the patchwork pants and the shorts that looked like they'd been cut from the Brady family's curtains. If the eccentric decorative elements suggested an outsider artist run riot, that was merely in keeping with Prada's own magpie aesthetic. It's all about borrowing from any time, any place, to give vital character to clothing—and what a character the Miu Miu man will be!
30 June 2004
The Miu Miu label is ideal for those times when we feel like scanning the stores for an inexpensive simulacrum of a designer look—as in, every other Saturday, minimum. And when fall rolls around, and we are seized by the urgent need for a long plain boyish V-neck cardigan, or something tweedy and vintagey with a sparkly detail and a scrap-of-fur collar, or a dress with a semi-destroyed sexual allure, Miu Miu will be right there with the goods.That's hardly surprising, because it was Miuccia Prada who invented, or reinvented, this look in the first place. Not that Miu Miu is an ersatz replica of Prada (leave that to the copyists). In this collection, she added original extras, like beat-up washed-leather jackets, long-line maxi coats, slim calf-length dresses, and skirts reminiscent of early seventies Ossie Clark. Beaded, jewelled details were applied to the oversize buttons on tweed coats and small forties-styled jackets, the edges of inverted pleats on skirts, and the toes of dainty brocade pumps. All of this was held together by a magically subtle color sense—chestnut, mousy browns, grays, maroons, and dull flashes of bronze, copper, antique gold, and green.While some of the signature, crinkled lining-silk dresses looked irresistible, others—especially the sheer printed frocks—presented a what-do-I-do-with-this challenge. Ninety-nine percent of this collection, though, was totally liveable, mixable fashion—testament to Miuccia Prada's commercial intelligence, as well as her storied talent.
26 February 2004
Sometimes the most inspirational fashion doesn’t come as an in-your-face design statement, but as a suggestion—like spotting a girl on the street who really knows how to put herself together. Watching Miu Miu’s collection for spring was just like that: a gentle mix of vintage and new, casual and decorative, anchored with the perfect accessories.Miuccia Prada knows, for instance, exactly how to make one of those vibrant pink sixties cocktail shifts—the sort that come encrusted with jewels at the neck—wearable by throwing on a plain sage-green cardigan, pulling it in with a leather belt, and accessorizing with a pair of cute but grounding suede pumps. Voila, easy.That kind of eclectic, offhand charm pervaded the entire collection from the little rumpled linen jackets and coats, to the denim shirtdresses and high-waisted pedal pushers, to the fifties dressmaker–style evening frocks. Better still, it was a show of irresistible accessories. In the hair, feathery fifties headbands. On the feet, printed plush-velvet high pumps or flat moccasins. In the hand, soft leather bags with bamboo handles or brilliant orange versions encrusted with beads. It all amounted to an idealized inventory of the lucky finds millions of girls spend their Saturdays seeking out at flea markets. Next season, no need to waste time: It’s all there, ready and waiting at that clever Miuccia’s stall.
3 October 2003
If Miu Miu is Prada's kid sister, she's squaring up for a bout of sibling rivalry for fall. She's all grown up, and she wants the tweeds and the furs and the raincoats—and the posh croc bag with the head scarf tied to it. If big sis is getting into menswear, she'll have a piece of that, too, and some of those silk dresses and gloves for good measure.The Miu Miu act isn't a literal duplication of the main line, of course, but it catches the same spirit of classic dressing, inheriting quite a few of Prada's greatest hits, as well as some cuter fillips. The fur tippets from Prada's famous ’40s collection reappeared here, twisted into scarves and capes. The house styling trick of cinching a waist with an unmatched leather belt turned up on coats, cardigans and dresses. Last winter's great rubberized mac and tweedy pencil skirts made an encore too.This collection is all about filling shops with inexpensive, fast-moving items, and even if a lot of the ideas are Prada recycling her own vintage design, it's still apace with her current thinking. It doesn't give the thought-through luxe of its elder, but it does have witty ways of imitating. Instead of a full fur lining inside a sweater or jacket, an extended furry collar is tucked inside things to fake the effect. There's the key gauntlet glove, but in gray mohair knit, not croc. Good buys abound: well-cut mannish suits, wing-tip shoes and eye-catching pink or red houndstooth coats. As Miuccia Prada has always asserted, Miu Miu isn't a watered-down diffusion line. These sisters know when to share and when not to—so everyone goes home happy.
3 March 2003
Miu Miu is the place to go for neat, unpretentious versions of whatever trends happen to be falling from the sky in a season. Right now, that means the line is awash with bright color, prints, chinoiserie, sporty clothing, goddess dresses and high hemlines.Miuccia Prada’s knack is to bring such elements together in a fresh, offhand way. For spring, she pulled oversize sweaters on top of white shirts and paired them with Hawaiian prints made into Bermudas and caban coats; the whole look was perched atop ’70s-esque snakeskin platform shoes. A few of the shirts fastened at an angle like a cheongsam, a theme that returned at the end of the show in vibrant fuchsia and crocus-yellow crumpled satin.The Miu Miu girl can work some athletic style into her life with wide, cropped cotton drill jackets, jersey cheerleader skirts and sawed-off sweats, making sure to flash maximum leg at all times. A few white cotton goddess dresses and bra-topped baby-dolls came down the runway, though the show's kicker was an eye-socking short coat in the brightest red satin. The collection didn't push any intellectual frontiers, but it did provide plenty of straightforward stuff to wear, and that’s just fine.
30 September 2002
While Prada is designed for adult-only sexual sophisticates this season, Miu Miu is for the naughty little sister who has a saucy act all her own. This is a girl out to prove she can look provocative even in a beige raincoat, when it’s cut short and worn with head-turning hotpants and a cute sou’wester.So what if she didn’t actually live through early ’70s? This expert young flirt makes free with quirky versions of fashions her mother knew so well. Styles like stiff culottes, doubleknit halter rompsuits, corduroy coats, chiffon blouses, and patch pockets applied in contrasting colors. All that cranberry, violet, brown, yellow and green. She adores the mumsy no-no of shiny quilting when it’s made up into a pair of nutty emerald green overalls or a nipped-in navy trench. And those cute little jackets that tie in the back to emphasize her trim curves are irresistible. But then, why should she exercise restraint? After all, life’s a blast when you’re in charge of a fab body and a pair of great legs.
4 March 2002
Miuccia Prada was in a romantic, youthful mood at Miu Miu, updating the prairie themes that have been so popular on other runways.Miu Miu's take on home-on-the-range dressing was livened up by delicate ethnic touches—like Moroccan-inspired embroidery on full-bodied, pleated skirts that dance at the knee. Long, tiered skirts make the transition from country to city style when worn with peppy floral button-downs and smart little cardigans. At times, things got just a little too girly—it's hard to imagine anyone past 16 wearing a Little Red Riding Hood smock with gathered short sleeves. On the other hand, there were plenty of simpler, breezier camisoles that will work as chic, simple Summer staples.For the practically minded, Prada included an assortment of sensible pantsuits and boyish blazers—perfect for a new generation of career girls.
30 September 2001
Miuccia Prada reworked at Miu Miu many of the themes she presented in her signature collection, giving them a light-hearted, dreamy feeling.The countercultural, '50s-inspired girls of last season have now moved on to the '60s, and are wearing sheer lingerie slips, sleeveless wool shifts, short capes with front pockets and double-breasted boiled-wool minicoats. Like their more mature cousins at Prada, Miu Miu enthusiasts love black—but they can also add plenty of color to their mod look with flower-printed robes and little Empire-waisted dresses in bright green and red. Sharp denim jackets, pleated skirts and straight jeans work perfectly with crinkly cotton shirts as a hip city uniform.Miu Miu's accessories always tie the looks together. In this case, black stockings, cracked-leather Mary Janes and low-slung tan bags all looked polished yet slightly worn—as if a fashion-savvy gamine had rifled through her mother's closet, borrowing all the right stuff.
5 March 2001
The '50s-by-way-of-the-'80s spirit that Miuccia Prada referenced in her signature line also turned up at Miu Miu, here with a young, utilitarian spin.The collection opened with short skirts that were dwarfed by oversize drop-shoulder jackets cinched at the waist with wide elastic belts; there were large exterior pockets on cropped tops, skirts and jackets. Striped mohair sweaters looked smart with a pleated full skirt to the knee; pointy librarian glasses accentuated the '50s collegiate look. Lighter pieces included a semi-sheer white camisole with spaghetti straps, an Empire-waist gray shift, and several printed and pleated baby-doll dresses.The accessories also picked up on the themes seen at Prada. Geometric color-block pumps conveyed a girly and playful spirit, while the wide-strapped bags brought to mind the need for urban, no-nonsense essentials.
5 October 2000
Miuccia Prada reworked some of the most outstanding concepts of her signature line into accessible looks for Miu Miu, her diffusion label. It was an eminently wearable, simple and refined collection, centered on sweet, girly dresses—pale-rose chiffon slips, some gathered or bunched--and the season's all-important essential—the perfect jacket. Loose coats with rounded shoulders, ample shiny skirts and fitted tweed suits successfully acknowledged the '40s-inspired elegance present in much of the Fall collections. Pleated wool skirts were worn with casual striped tees, and optical-printed skirts and tops were playfully mixed and matched. Once again, Prada proved that diffusion lines can often compete with the best of the rest.
25 February 2000
Miuccia Prada confirmed, once again, that she is one of the greatest creative talents in fashion at the moment. Her new Miu Miu line, aptly entitled "Almost a Lady," was an intelligent play on the discreet charm of the modern—and young—bourgeoisie. Classic prep ensembles were reinvented with '90s shine, attitude and confidence. Pleated skirts were worn with colorful mules, baseball jackets were outfitted with patent leather detailing, and pale slacks and skirts were dressed up with diamond detailing. The looks never seemed forced or over-the-top; indeed, the collection's greatest strength was the masterful balance between embellishment and function. These are the types of clothes that women can wear everyday, anywhere, with the self-assured certainty that they'll never be underdressed—or overdone.
30 September 1999
Editor’s Note: We’re kickstarting the fall 2024 menswear season by adding two Miu Miu ready-to-wear collections—spring and fall 1999—to the Vogue Runway archive. These were the first two shows featuring Miu Miu menswear, a line that was active for a decade (1998-2008), and around which a nostalgic cult has developed. It’s impossible to relive the past, but documenting it is a different story…. Enjoy.Miu Miu’s fall 1999 coed collection, reported theNew York Times’s Amy Spindler, was inspired by “a passage from a Tim Burton short story about Stick Boy and Match Girl, whose gist is that each thinks the other is hot. ‘I think young guys are so charming,” Miuccia Prada told the critic. “I like the way young people are different and so sweet with each other.” Besides being a nice sentiment, it was also good business; as the newspaper’s Lynn Hirschberg would report later that year in a story titled “Desperate to Seem 16”: “the teenage children of the baby-boom generation happen to form the largest audience of teenagers in history.” That meant a lot of attention was being paid to these 2.0 Youthquakers, and to chasing youth, both at the box office (the writer suggestedRomeo + Julietkicked off the trend for teen drama in entertainment) and on the shop floor.In this collection Mrs. Prada seemed to have made the leap from matchsticksto matching;the men’s and women’s looks were more aligned than they had been the previous season. Once again there was an emphasis on the outdoors, which was expressed through the palette, the hiking boots, and the use of “natural” materials like suede and shearling. At the same time some shoes had rubber soles and others holographic patterns. The ad campaign found the models in a futuristic box through which a nighttime cityscape could be spied. They appeared to be suspended in space as they sat and lounged on windows, looking through panes of glass at the world—come to think of it, that’s pretty much how we use our phones 25 years later.
11 January 2024
Editor’s Note: We’re kickstarting the fall 2024 menswear season by adding two Miu Miu ready-to-wear collections—spring and fall 1999—to the Vogue Runway archive. These were the first two shows featuring Miu Miu menswear, a line that was active for a decade (1998-2008), and around which a nostalgic cult has developed. It’s impossible to relive the past, but documenting it is a different story…. Enjoy.The deck chairs at thefall 2022Miu Miu show invited a relaxed posture, so if guests didn’t sit up rod-straight when Loic Paulmier (Look 13) appeared; their fashion antenna certainly did. Only a handful of male models made their way down the runway, but it was enough to resurrect the cult of Miu Miu men’s, a line that was introduced in 1998 and abandoned in 2008. (Interestingly, Prada Sport also launched for spring 1999.)There’s been no announcement of a Miu Miu men’s relaunch and no menswear category exists on the brand website, but that hasn’t hindered the tidal wave of nostalgia—on the part of people who knew and loved the brand and others who are enamored with the idea of it. Both groups pine for the kind of clothes that go beyond basic in subtle ways, and represent a reverie of unspoiled youth.While not a “little sister” brand to Prada, Miu Miu (a diminutive of Miuccia, the designer’s nickname) was priced lower and skewed younger. The magic of the line was and is how it manages to capture that indefinite, ambiguous, in-between moment associated with the transition into adulthood, while at the same time suggesting uniforms in which it might be navigated. That feeling is present in the first exit from spring 1999, in which James Rousseau wears a blazer over a tie-neck shirt, shorts, and velcro-close sandals. Together, the elements somehow link la vie bohème and gorp core with a first interview/first job twist. “Miu Miu for men recalls Forrest Gump–a very cool Forrest Gump,” wasThe Toronto Star’s take.Some writers found Miu Miu men’s, especially early on, to be androgynous. If the women’s and men’s clothes are very closely related here, so are the models in their youth. The male models look especially baby-faced, almost like Counselors in Training, even if they were dressed more formally than their female counterparts.
That sense of finding one’s footing, or exploring new terrain, carried over to the collection’s ad campaign which featured May Andersen and Rousseau, separately, in a man-made tropical setting outfitted with a supermodern, clinical camper or tent. A kind of controlled wildness was also present in the clothes, which straddled work and play, and transformed more homey, country elements (fringe, cowboy boots) for the city.The relevance of Miu Miu’s spring 1999 coed collection isn’t just connected to nostalgia for the menswear line, but might provide clues about where fashion’s going. A year after this show was presented,The Daily Telegraph’s Hilary Alexander reported that “the latest spin-off from minimalism has been christened ‘utility chic’ or ‘the urban uniform’ a no-frills, no-fuss working wardrobe that is as easy as a takeaway and as quick as an email. The details may have come from sportswear, but the interpretation is strictly uptown–clean, crisp, and modern. The ingredients are techno fabrics and a pared-shown, streamlined silhouette.” These thoughts seem to echo New Year’s predictions regarding a reboot of gorp core, no?
11 January 2024
Editor’s note: We continue our tradition of expanding the Vogue Runway archive by digitizing collections originally shot on film. Here are a quartet of shows from Miu Miu, which had back-to-back hits in 2023 with the pantless look and neo-prep polo styles. This fall 1998 collection was originally presented in Milan in March 1998.Miuccia Prada had the Space Age ’60s in sight for fall 1998, 40 years after the birth of NASA. Both her Prada and Miu Miu collections shared a palette of white, red, and black and featured geometric silhouettes. Opening the Miu Miu show was a white funnel-neck top and miniskirt, accessorized with white patent Mary Janes. Shapes—in the form of curved patch pockets on a leggy dress or four squares on a coat (indicating where inner Velcro closures were placed)—provided monochrome decoration. A few bubble hems and frills added volume, but the main message was aerodynamics.
29 December 2023
Editor’s Note: We continue our tradition of expanding the Vogue Runway archive by digitizing collections originally shot on film, with a quartet of shows fromMiu Miu, which had back-to-back hits in 2023 with the pantless look and neo-prep polo looks. This spring 1998 collection was originally presented in Milan in October 1997.The origins of Miu Miu’s spring 1998 collection was related in a 1995Vogueprofile of Miuccia Prada. One day, reported the magazine, the designer, her husband Patrizio Bertelli, and the team “were sitting around reminiscing about the hippie clothes Miuccia wore in the 1970s and how much fun it would be to wear them now, when someone suggested producing them in-house. Two months later Miuccia had created a complete collection of fringed suede shoulder bags, gauzy ruffled dresses, deerskin maxi skirts, and rawhide moccasins.”This context seems particularly relevant because the show opened with a laced corset top that seemed to nod to an iconic Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche design of 1977. The Frenchman showed it in the context of a boho reverie of full, swirling skirts. Prada latched on to the Left Bank vibe and took it in an imaginative, yet more utilitarian direction. Miu Miu’s bustier was paired with sailor-style button-front cropped pants in a summer-camp palette of khakis and blues.Boy Scout belts and ponyskin waist pouches punctuated lingerie dresses appliquéd with child-like shapes of cherries, hearts, ducks, reindeer, and hands. There was also a cross stitch print of an ice cream cone. This deliciousness was followed by a group of candy-colored cotton looks, some with rick-rack trim, in maraschino red, blueberry, and licorice, along with a group of black looks featuring metallic “sprinkles.” For the finale there were satin ensembles in jewel tones, some with a bit of pouf at the sleeve or the skirt, others with half aprons. Signature Miu Miu through-and-through, it fulfilled the brand’s mission, saidVogue, of capturing “the truly eccentric side of Miuccia.”
28 December 2023
Editor’s Note: We continue our tradition of expanding the Vogue Runway archive by digitizing collections originally shot on film, with a quartet of shows fromMiu Miu, which had back-to-back hits in 2023 with the pantless look and neo-prep polo looks. Here, the brand’s circus-themed fall 1997 lineup, which was presented in London in March 1997.“Miu Miu is romantic but edgy,” Claire Danes toldThe Evening Standardfrom her front-row perch at Miu Miu’s fall 1997 show, which was presented in London. The actress spoke from experience, having worn the brand inRomeo + Juliet.What this collection had in common with the Baz Luhrmann movie was an underlying sense of forbidden pleasures. According to designer Miuccia Prada, it followed the story of “of a very young girl”—a clotheshorse—“working at the circus.”The heroine’s age was emphasized by leg-revealing minis. There were traces of school uniforms in the neat pleated skirts with see-through knit tops and tailored jackets and coats in serious gray. For her inner acrobat, Prada included sports elements, such as heavy knits and woolens cut into pullovers and zip-front “hoodies.” Bedazzled shoes, meanwhile, let our protagonist bring a bit of the big top with her wherever she goes.
27 December 2023
Editor’s Note: We continue our tradition of expanding the Vogue Runway archive by digitizing collections originally shot on film, with a quartet of shows fromMiu Miu, which had back-to-back hits in 2023 with the pantless look and neo-prep polo looks. First up is the brand’s runway debut. This spring 1995 collection was originally presented in New York on October 30, 1994.Maybe it’s the fact that the label’s moniker is taken from Prada’s diminutive nickname, but there’s long been a sense that Miu Miu is somehow a reflection of the designer’s innerself—that it functions as a sort of private playground. That sense of intimate connection was only bolstered by Prada’s focus on deshabille at this label. Whether she was caught in the process of getting dressed or getting undressed is up for debate, but the early Miu Miu heroine existed on the edge of womanhood, and was trying on personas as well as clothes.We know from a 1994New Yorkerprofile, that at one point Mrs. Prada’s wardrobe was largely supplied by the Ferrari sisters, high-end Milanese children’s tailors, “where she had dresses and coats made to order, scaled up to her size and with ‘corrections,’ such as a bigger or smaller collar than the one that was there.” Many of the details used in children’s clothing, such as smocking, insets of lace, and ruffles, likewise appear on lingerie. They also appear in Miu Miu’s spring 1995 collection.“The models,” notedVogueat the time, “looked like they were en route to the beauty salon, with tangled hair, long-line cotton bras, and sheer peignoirs,” but the collection really raised eyebrows at The Daily Mail, which called out its “slew of see-through dresses worn over garish red underwear.” If only they knew what was coming! Miu Miu’s pantless collection for fall 2023 was one of this year’s most influential collections.Already known for turning industrial nylon into a fashion fabric, Prada was looked to for her material sense. The opening pair of skirt suits here were as shiny as lining fabrics. By look three, the model was already down to her underpinnings. Later, some of the garments seemed to be in-process, with slips dipping below skirt hems in a few instances or seams that looked like they had been finished with pinking shears. Elsewhere, the use of elastic-loop and button fastenings spoke to the physical act of composing oneself—a reminder that even an “undone” look is consciously put together; it is a choice.
“Miu Miu is all about bad taste,” Prada toldVoguein 1995. “For me it’s either total elegance or total bad taste. We call Miu Miu the bad girls. It’s innocent young girls pretending to be elegant and not making it. Not having a concept of what is right, to me that is very sexy.”
26 December 2023