“Every single morning, I decide if I am a 15-year old girl or a lady near death“, Miuccia Prada told Vogue in her recent profile. Looking at her latest Miu Miu collection, Miuccia definitely felt like the first, but with perspective of an experienced woman who has lived a LIFE. It seems that while being 74 years old, the designer has never felt that liberated creatively. She knows her codes. She knows what’s up. She’s loves to mess it up, and she understands exactly how to make the industry fall on its knees.

Again, Miu Miu is the winner of Paris Fashion Week, and the impact of the autumn-winter 2024 – styled by Lotta Volkova – will be perceivable in the way we interact with fashion for the next six months (or more!). Classics, uniforms and bourgeois staples are twisted and subverted, creating a collection just so multi-faceted and frivolous that you just can’t resist it. The show opened with shrunken coats in heavy wool, worn with cuffed slacks, mum’s pearls, and a roomy zip-top bag tucked under the arm. Capote’s “Swans“? Not really. The man-size gloves suggested the Miu Miu girl sees the world through a different lens. She’s on the ground with her two feet. Even while wearing her short little baby-doll shift dress sprinkled with strasse embroidery and lady-like wool suits paired with grey schoolgirl tights and black leather Mary Janes. “Everyone can choose from them, to be a child or a lady”, said the designer after the show, which included some models who were nearer to the designer’s age including Kristin Scott Thomas and Dr Qin (a Shanghai-based doctor and huge Prada collector). 

This season, Miu Miu – which originally in the late 90s and early 2000s meant to be Prada’s sister line – has always been like a daughter, who sometimes hates her mother’s image, and sometimes looks up to her. By mother, I mean the Prada wardrobe. Silk 1950s skirts came in so-bad-it’s-good floral prints in the most acidic shades known to human eye. Even the family heirloom “mink” coats (they were actually dyed shearling) and the kind of chic LBD’s that Audrey Hepburn might have worn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” weren’t just classy, they were daring, they had nonchalance of a youngster. Miuccia, I love you!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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