Is Miu Miu the “old Prada” now? After Miuccia Prada‘s first Prada collection with Raf Simons, which left the audience polarised, this seems to be a good idea for Miu Miu. But them, this was a quintessentially Miu Miu outing – really, the spring-summer 2021 collection is one of the best in a while coming from the brand. Livestreamed from Milan during the last day of Paris Fashion Week, the show set imagined a cyber-spacious sports arena covered in screens with the – also livestreamed – faces of Miu Miu poster girls watching the show, including Elle Fanning, Chloé Sevigny (one of the checked tops was the original piece she wore in the brand’s ad campaign shot by Juergen Teller!), Małgorzata Szumowska, Susie Lau and other Miu faces. Opened by Lila Moss, the collection captured the accidental uniforms of young people. It’s a wardrobe suspended between the extremes of the hyper-casual and that stilted sense of formality you get from a prom photo. “Polarity. These are polar times,” as Prada said in a statement after the show. “The reason why people dress is sometimes to please, sometimes to be sexy, sometimes to be socially relevant, sometimes for a job. The way you present yourself – the clothes are important because they define you in a second. Clothes are a tool for that message,” she continued. “The first spectator of yourself is you.” The Miu Miu show read like the Euphoria generation’s guide to effortless dressing: the things you wear through the process of learning the messages Prada wanted to convey about the role of clothes in life. Prim and pristine low-riding track pants, sharp track jackets, micro skirts, and kitten-heeled tennis shoes embodied the dress codes of sports activities. Sporty blazers, little bowling jackets, neat shirts, and plaid skirts evoked school uniforms. Conceived in the teenage dreams of perfect party outfits, there were techno-fied halter-neck shell tops and oscillating techy dresses. Then, some dream prom scenarios as well, like a white dress with a draped bow on the back that curtained dramatically to the side to reveal its pink lining. Prada’s show notes talked about the institution of the fashion show as a unifying event – something she wanted to convey through her livestreamed experience. Carried by the young women on her runway, that sentiment reminded some of us of the time we fell in love with fashion shows in the first place; in our teenage bedroom, chunky laptop at hand, waiting for the first runway pictures from our favorite shows to come in.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.