Miuccia Prada's Other Self: Miu Miu

HER OTHER SELF

IN HER OWN WORDS

Miuccia Prada on instinct, contradiction, and the evolving spirit of Miu Miu.

By Susannah Frankel

Miuccia Prada likes bravery – she is herself brave. And it is a quality she admires in others. “Bravery is something women always need,” she commented at the time the collection was shown. “This talks about the fantasies of women, their imaginations and dreams of different places, different ideas. Following your dreams is courageous – that takes bravery and strength.”

“The show in the mountains was personal – exactly that,” Miuccia Prada says. Entitled Brave Hearts, it was filmed in March 2021, with Europe in the throes of the third wave of the pandemic. With references to both Tyrolean and Highland dress, Miu Miu’s Autumn/Winter collection also draws on the dress codes adopted by its designer as a young woman. Those were unconventional. “I had so much fun in the mountains, skiing in a skirt,” she remembers. “I skied in a bikini too. I did it back then. It was perfectly normal. And the mountains are my fa-

vourite place in the world. I am in love with the mountains. I enjoy them at any moment, under every circumstance. I don’t know why.” Susannah Frankel is asking Miuccia prada all the questions everyone’s been wondering.

Can we talk first about the Miu Miu show in the mountains?

I’m not sure I would do it again now but at that point you didn’t need many people, which was a good thing, and also there was so much snow. I said it’s now or never. Then everybody got excited. It was a long discussion because of the difficulties of there being no physical show. If you call directors, good movie directors, they are not, I think, very good at doing fashion, and fashion people, of course, they don’t know how to make movies. So we had to improvise, to reinvent our jobs. It all came

out of this idea of bravery. The mountains, the walking in the snow, the symbol of being brave. Back then I was fixated on women being brave.

In one way the collection was mountain appropriate – the big trousers, the big boots, the Tyrolean references, the Highland references – but in another way it was about a skirt covered in jewels. That’s very you. The conservative and radical, the appropriate and the inappropriate, often in one look.

That is what I always aim for and it comes instinctively.

You were one of the first people to actually combine high fashion and sport in the 90s with Prada Sport.

I remember back then I never wanted to dress myself in sporty things. I didn’t like them. And I asked myself why when you do sport, or ski, do you have to become another person? I want to keep my love of fashion, my ideas. I don’t want to transform myself into someone else, into a sporty man or a sporty woman, wearing what everyone else is wearing. That was the origin of it.

And today you still combine two apparently contrasting worlds. The idea of the couture gesture – the gloves are big woolly gloves but they’re still long gloves, the hats, the jewellery – with something much more obviously functional.

That’s something that I really like. I like that when you do sport you retain your spirit. So if you run, why shouldn’t you wear a pair of earrings? Be covered in jewels, running along?

Miu Miu especially seems to be about female rites of passage – about a girl becoming a woman, a girl on the cusp of womanhood. Of

course, that’s not actually about age at all but about spirit, of that time in a woman’s life, the time when you’re a girl working out what being a woman means. That’s right. That’s great. It’s true that Miu Miu is also about that fragility, the fact that you don’t know who you are, who you want to be. You want to be beautiful, you want to be sexy – but you also want to be nasty, intelligent and political.

People always say Miu Miu is younger but it’s not about being young physically. It’s about ... The mentality.

It is also the embodiment of the fact that you can be 40, 50, 60, 70, but you can still flirt. I strongly believe in that. Apart from I don’t go out in miniskirts, which if you have the courage to and you want to, then why not, but apart from that, when I dress I’m not dressing like an old woman. When you are older, dressing is even more about bravery.

Is there more of a sense of your renegade spirit in Miu Miu?

Absolutely. It’s what I like in life. I have not always been able to be enough like that perhaps. I was when I was young, with my political ideas and activities, I kind of did it. Probably not enough. But that’s what I like.

You have been one of very few designers who have actually changed our aesthetic, changed the way people – women and men also – dress. At the beginning, you had to fight to be understood, people described your work as ugly, and certainly it played with received notions of taste. Do you feel proud of that?

Of that, yes, I am proud. I think that if I have achieved anything it is that. But it wasn’t revolutionary. It was subtle. It was only in fashion that there was this obsession with beautification in a conventional sense. In art, in the movies, in books, those ideals were questioned. And I too thought that was so old-fashioned, so conservative. Now it’s normal to question those values. I think I have contributed to that.

yourFollowing

dreams

is courageous – that takes bravery and strength.

A BRAVE HEART

An exploration of imagination, identity, and the power of women to define themselves.

Shot By Steven Miesel

BRAVE. REBELLIOUS. SEXY. INTELLIGENT. BRAVE. REBELLIOUS. SEXY. INTELLIGENT.

A Brave Heart Collection, Starring Emma Corrin

After a fashion show staged as a real fantasy - almost-impossibly presented in the landscape of Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites Alps - the Fall/Winter 2021 Miu Miu collection designed by Miuccia Prada returns to the context of fashion, itself another fantasy of realities, exploring the power of clothes as a conveyance of character, an expression of strength.

BRAVE. REBELLIOUS. SEXY. INTELLIGENT. BRAVE. REBELLIOUS. SEXY. INTELLIGENT.

REBELLIOUS. INTELLIGENT. REBELLIOUS. INTELLIGENT. REBELLIOUS. INTELLIGENT. REBELLIOUS. INTELLIGENT.

The hero of this Miu Miu campaign is the actor Emma Corrin, captured in a direct and arresting series of studio portraits, her gaze in each an echo of female archetypes - joyful and reflective, serious or seductive - photographed by Steven Meisel with creative direction by M/M Paris.

Miu Miu celebrates bravery, boldness - it is rooted in and inspired by communities of women, in the power of the collective. Accompanying the print campaign, a series of five short films allow Corrin to reinvent herself once more - as different characters, within different personae. Corrin reads aloud a series of anecdotes, recollections, remembrances - recounting memories, true and imaginary, in her own voice and those of others. Again, lines are blurred: is Corrin acting, or actual - are these her words, or a script?

She is brave.

Disruptive. Contradictory.

She is never just one thing.

A collection of Miuccia Prada’s most playful ideas, and the ever-evolving identity of who wears them.