An impossible show, a physical event mediated through the virtual, a community gathered together despite the distance. A paradox. For her Miu Miu Spring / Summer 2021 collection, Miuccia Prada invites an international community of today’s women – at the same time and in a single digital space – to live an experience, to have fun together as in a perfect Miu Miu Club. fashion show and collection are both inspired by the shared language of sport and fashion, finding the parallels that bind these two forms of spectacle, of observed performance, united by the same need: the need for an audience to act as a witness. Both are a means of expression for the human being, in which observation is essential.
Both fashion shows and sports exist to be watched, to entertain, to give joy. They are performative phenomena, where the presence of an audience is essential both for the event and for the actors, in a two-way exchange. Both address a community connected internally by the clothing it wears, by self-identification.
The stage of the Miu Miu fashion show is an amphitheater, a ‘sports palace’ called Miu Miu Club, reimagined by AMO, experienced as a digital experience by the specially invited audience. Bright pink sound-absorbing foam softens phalanxes of video screens showing the different groups of Miu Miu women gathered around the world. Like sport, fashion also needs spectators: not passive and invisible, but active and interactive. Broadcast live inside the room, the reactions of the audience are an integral part of an unavoidable appointment with the models. Their presence enhances the performance.
The atmosphere is of intrinsic polarity: evening dresses contrasted with sportswear, pragmatism and refinement, reality against digital, an event set up in front of an empty stadium, yet observed by many at the same time. The garments are inspired by the spectacular language of athletes’ clothing and evening dresses rich in ornaments: blocks of color, jersey, streamlined shapes, harness contrasted with decoration, adornment, femininity, softness. The dual need for action and attraction has led to similar aesthetic results. The shapes are simple: blousons, straight trousers, wrap skirts that open at the height of the thigh. The fabrics are light, the hems shortened, to free the figure inside.
The genesis of Miu Miu can become its exegesis: the re-examination of the maison’s early years is reflected in the simplicity of the silhouettes and in the search for the meeting point between sportswear and fashion, an obsession that has accompanied Miuccia Prada throughout her career. . Footwear mixes archetypes of sport and tropes of femininity: sneakers and football boots with high heels. Seemingly dichotomous points of view, but in practice in harmony with each other because in the end they reflect the duality of reality, of people.
Physical and physical, visual and virtual. In a context of necessarily heightened self-awareness, of incessant and inevitable digital consumption of one’s image, in the end the most important viewer is the self.
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