USHERING in a new Miu Miu woman, the SS22 collection by Miuccia Prada reshuffled the foundations of everyday dress to create new appreciations of womenswear, free from the restrictions it so often is confined to. The clothes echoed the principles of menswear – a nod to Miu Miu’s dabbling in menswear that ended in 2008 perhaps? – with a subversive, seductive undertone. As Miuccia Prada notes, this was a collection all about, “using the existing to create the new”.
In this same line of thought, the codes of upper class dressing were subverted, slashing chino textiles to form rough-at-the-edges mini skirt flare; classic knit in a cropped, oversized rebellion; and mixing nightwear with slouchy daywear in an unashamedly unconventional fashion.
For Miu Miu’s SS22 collection, the safety many find in their everyday uniform was disputed, picked apart with little care for subtlety.
And while the ultra mini-skirts have scooped up the gold for the most talked about clothing piece of Paris fashion week, it wasn’t a collection that was all about skin-barring, shrunken and sexy details. There was a lot of dowdy shirting, loose fitting trousers, and librarian pleated skirts too.
Admittedly, so low slung they teased with the waist bands of Miu Miu’s take on boxer short underwear, designed in shades of neutral to echo the wider collection.
This moving back and forth between traditional and contemporary leads to fresh iterations of eternal, universal garments.
Researching the fundamental realities of dress, the collection was punctuated by inserts of film, captured by artist Meriem Bennani, whose body of work explores intimate relationships mediated through the camera.
Opening the show and then dotted sporadically throughout, clips of unruly, animated lighting equipment and fake-audience members providing their judgments in facial dramatics that could never dare be used in the real front rows of fashion weeks twisted your gaze, slicing through the seamless transition of look to look on the catwalk.
The effect was a further subversion of reality and fantasy. In turn, blurring the lines between virtual and real to create new perceptions.
Amidst a sea of tailoring and preppy clothing, the sparkling gowns, embroidered in the ultimate Miu Miu fashion, were amplified. And despite their styled down approach, they were far from what you would consider as daytime dressing.
Yet, isn’t this exactly what Miuccia Prada was hoping for? For audiences to look at the fanciful dressy items under an everyday lens.
What exactly is holding us back from wearing a floral embellished satin dress day-to-day? The idea of wearing what you want, not what you need, is a strong undercurrent flowing throughout the SS22 collection. This is, as Miuccia Prada puts it: “An antidote to meaningless novelty.”
by Lily Rimmer