Miuccia Bianchi Prada is an Italian billionaire fashion designer and businesswoman. She is the head designer of Prada and the founder of its subsidiary Miu Miu.
The Fall/Winter 2024 Prada collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons embeds fashion with fragments of histories, in an exploration of notions of beauty, of a contemporary world formed by memories. There is a romance, with the past.
“What if I told you, you aren’t the hero in your own story but the villain in someone else’s?” In this special project for Miu Miu, artist Sophia Al-Maria offers us an old story with a new twist. Gravity ∞ Grace is a fairy tale ending (of the world) about a court jester and a royal guard who can’t agree if life is a tragedy or comedy. The pair gaslight, gate-keep and girl-boss each other in an epic battle over POV. Featuring original music by musicians Takiaya Reed and Scarlett Viney of Divide and Dissolve and starring stuntwoman Ayesha Hussain as archetypal twins, this one-minute recap formed the introduction to the unabridged story which played out during the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2024 show in the Palais d’Iéna on October 3rd, 2023. Sophia Al-Maria’s expansive work across art, publishing, film and TV is united by an urgent question of perspective: if language and stories form our POV, how can we tell fantasy from reality?
An examination of fluid architecture, around the human body. The Spring/Summer 2024 Prada menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons proposes an absolute freedom of the body, expressed through the foundations of the garments that clothe it.
The Prada Fall Winter 2023 collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons reconceptualizes, reconsiders and ultimately rediscovers ideas of beauty. Beauty here is determined not by aesthetic, but by action - garments are signs, representations of the beauty of care, of love, of reality.
An assertion of the primacy of clothes. The Fall/Winter 2023 Prada menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons is a further exploration of the fundamentals of fashion. It champions its continuing meaning, value and significance today.
Watch the Miu Miu SS23 fashion show by Miuccia Prada, presented at Palais d’Iéna in Paris. Featuring a special project in collaboration with artist Shuang Li. “Every message is a translation but nothing has ever been translated.” The seemingly wireless “cloud” is supported by tens of thousands of kilometers of undersea cabling which populates the ocean floor. #ShuangLi’s work explores this tension between the material and immaterial, and the obfuscation thereof – the physical bodies of what we commonly think of as immaterial material sent via digital platforms. The messages lost in transmission do not just disappear, but rather, imagined here, can take on another form, punctuating the sky.
A sequence of realities - reflections, refractions, observations. Acts of reality. For this women’s runway show, Prada invites the viewpoint of film director Nicolas Winding Refn to conceive an experience around the collection. Entailing an immersive installation and the runway show’s physical environs in collaboration with AMO, it is an opportunity for observation and intersection between two creative spheres, an expansion.
Fashion is evoked through context, the juxtaposition of elements and garments, fashioning an impression, creating style. Fashion as a manner, a way as well as a means of appearing. An expression of choice.
A commemoration of life and living - of the occasion of everyday affording importance to each moment. An ideology of Prada becomes an etymology of beauty, a history of women.
A reaction to and reflection of reality, an economy, a freshness found in iterations of eternal, universal garments. The Spring/Summer 2022 Miu Miu collection by Miuccia Prada is an exercise in referencing and researching reality, using the existing to create the new. The foundations are classic - trousers, sweaters, shirts, blazers, suits and sheath dresses, absolute archetypes of everyday dress. A new balance of proportion is found through cutting into pieces - retaining the believable character of each, yet altering their relationship with the body. Trousers are cut into abbreviated skirts, sweaters and shirts carved out to reveal the body. Edges are left raw, elements of construction exposed in commemoration of the spontaneity of these actions. Embroideries reflect the decoration of night-time attire, embellishing dresses and suits. Everyday alongside every night, the aesthetic language of day and evening dress each serve a purpose and have a meaning within life. An antidote to meaningless novelty, the collection examines fundamental realities of dress, the needs and wants of people from their clothes. It is an amplification of actuality - a focus on reality. Alongside reality, fantasy: the physical and virtual spaces of the Miu Miu show are punctuated with works by the artist Meriem Bennani, whose body of work explores intimate relationships mediated through the camera. Here, that idea is echoed and overlapped with another interrelation, of women and fashion. Conceived alongside the collection, Bennani commands control of the Miu Miu live stream via a series of filmic artistic interventions starring her own mother. These fantasy sequences are mixed real-time into the broadcast of the show to blur lines between virtual and real. Underscoring these ideas, the interior of the Palais d’Iena is interrupted rather than transformed. Its architecture remains, a runway devised by AMO snaking through the centre, the audience balanced on Eames office chairs as an echo of the Palais’ continuing function as place of work. In the Palais, Bennani installs binocular-shaped screens to cut through the space, reforming and re-editing the physical experience of the show and projecting her films into real life. As with the clothing of the collection, these filmic cuts create a new work - editing reality, altering perceptions. Opening and ending music by Fatima Al Qadiri
PradaSS22 menswear collection - uncanny summer escape, concluding in a space where nature and artifact interact. The show represents a transition between a tunnel, an urban space, and the sea. The Prada SS22 menswear collection was filmed in Milan at the Fondazione Prada’s Deposito, as well as in Sardinia; in appreciation of and thanks to the Sardinian community, Prada supports the MEDSEA Foundation in its project to restore marine ecosystems with the reforestation of Posidonia Oceanica meadows in the Marine Protected Area of Capo Carbonara. Posidonia Oceanica is a marine plant endemic to the Mediterranean Sea, providing an important habitat for marine species and playing a crucial role in absorbing CO2 to help mitigate climate change.