Miuccia Prada’s latest Miu Miu show had a knife-to-the-throat intensity, leaving you reeling with unease — the same feeling you get after watching an episode of “Black Mirror.”
It will also make many women fall in love all over again with LBDs, luncheon suits, pearl necklaces, fur jackets (made of shearling though) and pencil skirts. All were idealized — or slyly warped — and mixed together in that inimitable, impertinent Miu Miu way.
“Black Mirror” has dedicated episodes to memory — the fallible ones of human beings versus the faultless storage capacity of machinery — and here Prada embraced a sweep of clothing archetypes from different stages of life: the prim Peter Pan-collared coats of childhood; the uniforms and scrubs for work, and the celebratory moments in a pouf skirt with Warhol-esque florals, or a suede jacket tacked with crystal brooches.
Her cast, too, offered variety, spanning from Gigi Hadid to actresses Kristin Scott Thomas and Ángela Molina, both in their sixties.
“Classic items from all moments — and you can choose the child, you can choose the lady,” the designer told reporters after her show. “I show possibilities — of course, fashion possibilities that I think are relevant now — and definitely you can choose.
“Every single morning I have to decide if I am a 15-year-old girl or a lady near to death,” she said matter-of-factly, releasing a little chuckle.
A disquieting, futuristic film by American Belgian artist Cécile B. Evans played on a loop before the show, depicting a translator painting her nails and sipping out of her ginormous Stanley water bottle — bored to the bone. When she finally gets down to her work transcribing a memory transmission in a lost language, her eyes light up, but then she suffers her own memory leakage, depicted digitally, like spores leaving a mushroom.
Prada has that knack for making the familiar fabulous: adding some padding to a beige Mac or a Barbour-like jacket; shrinking knitted peacoats until they barely make it past the ribcage, and extending men’s deerskin gloves to elbow length. The Maytag repairman colors and the leather hotel slippers threw everything a little off-kilter.
Prada said she chose “typical” things for a reason. “For me, classic is what never goes out of fashion because it has a meaning,” she mused.
For more Paris Fashion Week reviews, click here.