The new Fall/Winter 2024 collection by Miu Miu captures the zeitgeist like no other, it’s a vocabulary of clothing, from youth to adulthood. The runway opens with various variations on classic attire and the uniforms of social workers: surgeons, teachers, nurses, and American Horror Story’s Moira O’Hara. The duality is strong and reflected in extremely polarized color displays: charcoal grays and navy blues; lime greens, purples, and Satsuma mandarins; reds and beiges. Balloon skirts with Pop floral prints reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein parade, paired with crocodile gloves, leather slippers, 9 to 5 square bags, crooked pearl strings, and crystal brooches. The youth signed by Miuccia Prada is dark: intentionally constricted proportions, short sleeves, rounded-toe shoes, gray sweaters paired with gray-blue Oxford shirts subtly hybridize wardrobe staples. A coral-colored knit dress marries a suede jacket covered in green crystals. They are archetypal clothing genres deliberately reminiscent of those worn in adolescence: a moment of natural and impulsive rebellion like Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Bella Baxter, reflected here in the liberation of a dichotomous mix of different clothing codes. Pajamas paired with outerwear, the appropriate with the improper, the right with the wrong. This is followed by an interlude of shrunken leather jackets paired with knit leggings, skinny jeans, buckle combat boots, and bucket bags. Now onto the manners of adulthood: gloves and handbags, pencil skirts, brooches, tailoring, and the little black dress à la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The same idea is reviewed, contemplated, expanded: the components of duality and memory find a counterpart in materials and construction, different fabrics are combined and paired with disparate garments.
Just as the collection reimagines the defining elements of life through the vocabulary of clothing, our literal vocabulary can also undergo a reevaluation.
The runway opens with a unsettling prelude by American-Belgian artist Cécile B. Evans on several screens. The installation features Guslagie Malanda in the role of a woman named Reception, one of the last human translators on Earth. Following a universal preservation error that led to the deletion of digital memory from any device, Reception works in a former parliamentary hemicycle transformed into a data collection center. She receives the transmission of a woman’s intimate memories. The woman speaks in Irish Gaelic, and Reception interprets her experience in French, dictating faithfully to a machine that transcribes it into English. In this process of reception and transition of the woman’s memories, Reception’s own memory escapes and becomes uncontrollable in the space of the runway. On the screen, the memory shifts to various storage devices, reinforcing the link between what we hold in our bodies and what is stored in the objects we carry with us. The echoes of the FW24 Miu Miu collection blend Y2K style with normcore, which is why it’s impossible not to see various Milanese autobiographical elements labeled by Miuccia Prada: there are five long fitted cotton and double-breasted coats from the 1960s and early 1970s; there’s the discreet charm of champagne-colored satin women’s dresses and faux furs; a gray wool coat with three buttons for men. This is followed by silk and cashmere sweaters and cardigans, poplin skirts, and wool sweaters while shearling is treated to mimic luxury furs. The red, green, and blue coats are extra-long. The silk dresses are wrinkled and shaped into cotton jersey sheaths, the volumes reduce but the garment’s original imprint remains, a trace of its predecessor. The succession closes with three impeccably tailored black cocktail dresses.
All that is unusual is made familiar, by adding padding to a beige raincoat or a Barbour-like jacket, reducing knitted cabans until they barely cover the ribs, and extending deer leather men’s gloves up to the elbow. The lightness of the mini-dresses contrasts with gloves, scarves, and glasses. Slippers, sturdy moccasins, flat Mary Janes, and low sculptural heels with dynamic tips embody a naive and sophisticatedly rough elegance to a rebellious, sometimes light soul. The language is direct and instantaneous: green, orange, blue, purple, and chocolate stockings make way for immediate creativity. Rectangular leather shoulder bags are lived-in and messy like those of Jane Birkin. As the curtain falls to the notes of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake played on the harpsichord, the show concludes.
