By the time the Miu Miu show rolls around on the last day of fashion month, most guests are ready to touch some grass.
Miuccia Prada unveiled her secondary line on a runway that looked like a churned horse racing track, which staff topped up with handfuls of twigs before the show — as if anyone would notice the difference.
It was the latest brand at Paris Fashion Week to inject a green element into a show set, after the mossy knolls at Hermès and Louis Vuitton, and Dior’s fake water lily pond. Invoking a bond with nature is the closest designers have come to commenting on the hellscape that is our current news feed, and Prada did too — sort of.
“Basically, it was the idea of a small human body compared with the vastness of the world,” she said after the show. “You, as a human person, you are enough. You don’t need anything, because you have yourself. You have your mind. That should be enough against whatever happens.”
As soaring oil prices once again bring issues of self-sufficiency to the fore, it’s tempting to reach for clothes that shelter and protect.
Prada, however, appeared to suggest no amount of Airalite or Heattech could keep you safe. Tiny tank dresses, shrunken washed leather jackets and crinkled cotton blazers had a lived-in feel, like the last surviving pieces of a person’s wardrobe.
Slim coats with high belts, worn down to a sheen in places, came with matching flared pants that dragged through the soil. There was a DIY feel to beefy leather coats with shaggy hems, and filmy cropped windbreakers lined with shearling.
The designer saw gentleness and intimacy in those worn fabrications, and the idea that our bodies are protection enough. “[I feel] actually reinforced by the idea that still, we exist. We are there,” she simply stated.
She drove home the point with a multigenerational cast stacked with captivating faces, including actors Gillian Anderson, Chloë Sevigny and Lily Newmark, and a smattering of nepo babies like Zola Ivy Murphy, the daughter of Eddie Murphy and Nicole Mitchell Murphy, and Sateen Besson, whose dad is French director Luc Besson.
If the minimal clothing felt like a ‘90s revival — more than timely, considering Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s Prada coat just sold for $192,000 at auction — the accessories spoke to Gen Z’s desire to stand out, with embellished chapkas, crystallized belts and bedazzled sneakers and pool slides.
After all, isn’t the whole point of luxury to buy things we don’t need?
