February 26, 2026 |
Discipline. Control, ritual, repetition.
Uncanny costuming places a cohort of dancers in matching poplin pinstripe dresses, their faces obscured, their bodies doubled by limp fabric mannequins tethered to their shoulders. It’s dawn – or dusk – hard to tell through the haze that hangs over an abandoned countryside manor where everything feels suspended between rehearsal and reality. It’s Discipline, the 31st instalment of Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series.
Premiering on February 12 in New York, Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales has championed female filmmakers since its debut in 2011. In Discipline, directed by Mona Fastvold, the house continues its ongoing conversation around femininity, authorship and the coded language of clothes.
The setting is gothic, almost claustrophobic. The film opens slowly: the sound of breathing, deep inhales and exhales, punctured by sporadic drumming – like pots clanging in a distant kitchen. The dancers move carefully, tending to their fabric mannequins as if preparing children for the day. They dress them in identical pinstripes, smoothing collars, aligning hems. Every detail, every gesture, is attended to.
Outside, they play. Dice games. Clapping games. Reading. Gymnastics on the grass. The mannequins remain strapped to them, passive but ever-present. Only the nuns move unencumbered – faces covered, expressions unknowable. When a bell rings, the dancers line up and march in formation, recalling schoolyard order with a faintly sinister edge. When one mannequin trips, the procession halts. The disruption is corrected. They continue.
Meals are taken in unison. A dropped spoon triggers another pause; heads turn toward the mistake. Even error has choreography. In the classroom, they sit examinations overseen by the faceless nuns. A head nun inspects their appearance. Everything is monitored.
Dance class offers a shift in tempo but not in control. The group moves in sync – port de bras, arabesques, turns and curtseys – as flutes and heavy strings swell. The choreography mutates into a clapping game, childlike at first, then increasingly frantic. The rhythm accelerates. Seated opposite one another, the mannequins appear to slap and jolt in erratic unison, the line between play and aggression collapsing.
Then, a rupture. One mannequin comes to life.
She rises abruptly, moving independently while her handler stumbles to follow. The others remain inert. She twirls away from the formation before falling into an embrace with her counterpart; bodies converge in a final heap. From the pile, she emerges transformed. Beneath the pinstripes, a crocheted baby pink button-up dress. For the first time, she removes her mask. It’s Amanda Seyfried. Hair falling loose, she strips away the uniform as the soundtrack shifts to something like birdsong – still intense, but lighter. She steps toward the manor’s glass doors and runs outside, her expression suspended between fear and relief, escape and uncertainty.
Fastvold frames girlhood as inherited performance – costumes worn before identity fully forms. Featuring pieces from the Miu Miu SS26 collection, Discipline considers clothing as both nurture and constraint. Here, garments dictate movement before self-knowledge arrives. Intimacy between girls and their clothes becomes a kind of predetermined theatre.
Following the screening at Village East by Angelika, Fastvold was joined in conversation with Celia Rowlson-Hall and Hailey Gates to discuss the ideas and rituals embedded in the film – and the ways clothing can both express and impose identity. The evening concluded with a dinner at Chez Margaux, where the dialogue continued late into the night.
Fifteen years on, Women’s Tales remains a space for female filmmakers to define their own visual language. With Discipline, that language is precise, unsettling and sharply observed – a study of how femininity is rehearsed long before it is understood.
Photography courtesy of Miu Miu.
