What is Miu Miu about? “Dressing with what’s left. Nobility and misery!” exclaimed Miuccia 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. Prada also added a new, sexy, curvy class of woman representation to the scene in the resplendent forms of Adriana Lima and Lara Stone. More power to the influence of that, next season.
