A vocabulary of clothing, from childhood to adulthood. Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu Autumn/Winter 2024 collection draws inspiration from the scope of people’s lives, with proposals that reflect the changing path of character development, both personal and universal.
Concomitant gestures express different moments of life, they coexist within individual outfits, just as each of us retains simultaneous memories of our own experience. Evocations of childhood are expressed with deliberately contracted proportions, short sleeves, shoes with rounded toes, archetypal types of clothing that directly recall those worn in youth. By contrast, adulthood is expressed through recognizable signifiers of good manners: gloves and handbags, brooches, tailoring, the little black dress. Childhood is a moment of natural and impulsive rebellion, which is reflected here in the liberation of a dichotomous mix of different codes of clothing, pajamas combined with outerwear, the appropriate with the inappropriate, the right with the wrong. Mnemonic tools, clothes can make us think about the past and at the same time project us into the future.
These components of duality and memory find a counterpart in materials and construction. Ties and fusion combine different fabrics and match disparate garments, silk and cashmere sweaters and cardigans, poplin skirts with knits, while shearling is treated to imitate fine fur. The silk dresses are crumpled and shaped into cotton jersey sheaths, the volumes are reduced but the imprint of the original garment remains, a trace of its predecessor.
As the collection reconsiders the characteristic signifiers of life through the vocabulary of clothing, so our literal vocabulary can be revisited. Girlishness is a term that we can reevaluate, from a gender noun, anchored to age, to a universal idiom that expresses the strength of rebellion, a spirit of freedom and individuality, an attribute of a richer whole. Perceived as an intrinsic component of Miu Miu, it should be examined not as a trait in its own right but as a fundamental aspect of a broader temperament, a concept expressed through a cast of personalities who each embody the ever-evolving Miu Miu character. These include Kristin Scott Thomas, Dara Allen, Ethel Cain, Guillaume Diop, Luther Ford, Angel Haze, Qin Huilan, Little Simz, Jasmin Savoy Brown and Ángela Molina, who also appears in Miu Miu Women’s Tales.
Contemporaneity allows divergent creative processes to achieve paradoxically related results. The Palais d’Iéna is dotted with video installations created by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans, art intended as a tool to enrich and expand conversation between people. Works conceived independently of the collection, the concepts of survival of memory expressed by pure chance are echoed in the clothes. It is a shared language, marked by the moment in which we all live, a universal message that nevertheless echoes our unique experience.
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