Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu is Powerfully Commercial
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Miu Miu is the last big show of Paris Fashion Week, and Miuccia Prada often takes this opportune moment to redefine the season, as she did last time with 28 power-print 1960s trouser suits. This afternoon, however, she seemed to want to offer a quieter, though no less direct, message.
Mrs Prada had travelled back another decade to the 1950s with her ode to the swing coat and the calf-length pencil skirt – a silhouette that is by now a Miu-Pra classic. The difference here was that it was made in denim, sometimes with bleached edges or with jewel buttons or brooches. The same shapes also took on a wrinkled lustrous fabric or shiny patent and reappeared again in gorgeous sweeping satin in even wider, grander coats – Jessica Stam’s in vivid pink, a fur stole thrown over one shoulder, and Karen Elson’s, in deep chartreuse, closed the show.
The models, with their choppy little fringes and heavy-rimmed spectacles, or 1950s smudged eyeliner ticks, looked as if they’d just stepped off a movie set; everything about this collection had a certain filmic quality to it. The offbeat, real elegance of the clothes, subverted of course with Miuccia’s little touches of something ‘other’. Flat jewelled sandals brought a girlish element to these otherwise grown up clothes. Bra tops peeping under swing jackets and the odd flash of long bare leg brought a flash of sexiness, and with all the fur, a vampish femme fatale quality to the proceedings. Fur stoles, for summer? And elbow-length leather gloves?
Accessories, darling. And the more the merrier from Miuccia Prada. The new Miu Miu bags? Ultra conservative. And like the clothes, powerfully commercial. How subversive is that?
