January 1, 2015 |
I feel like there’s something a bit perverse about pre-collections butting noses with the haute couture presentations in Paris, even if said butting is merely metaphorical. There was a good 24 hours between Miu Miu’s latest – the closer to an ungainly, two-month cruise season that, like a George A Romero zombie, seemed to cark and then rear its head again and again – and the Atelier Versace show that traditionally opens couture week on Sunday night. It was hardly loggerheads.
Yet the juxtaposition of the age-old, old-money artistry of haute couture with the new era of fast-paced fast fashion that the pre-collection represents was nonetheless stark. It was a collision of worlds, not just of seasons, two entirely different approaches to fashion sitting side by side. If we’re being basic about it, pre-collections represent commerce, couture creativity in its most unbridled, money-no-object form.
At least, those are the old restrictions – but they’ve gone out of the window. Miu Miu’s resort collection could stand its ground against couture, of equal (in some cases, greater) importance creatively, and dwarfing their impact commercially. The argument for couture continuing to exist in the 20th century is as talismanic link to fashion past, and as highly visible marketing tool. Couture’s worth to the handful of fashion houses that still produce it is as a dynamo of publicity, its profit and loss measured not by dresses ordered but by column inches written and photographs taken. It’s an odd, twisted version of an advertising campaign. It’s not about the clothes people wear every day.
So, couture means coverage and pre-collections mean sales, right? Wrong. The Miu Miu cruise show wasn’t jockeying against the couture shows for prominence. That’s ultimately what Miuccia Prada’s Miu Miu resort show meant in the great, grand scheme of things. It was as important, as covered, as avidly discussed as any of the haute couture collections. It was also staged with all the pomp and ceremony of the label’s mainline presentations. The venue was the same – the Palais d’Iena, a 1930s architectural gem, currently housing Paris’s Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental, with a dowdy interior that is transformed season after season according to Miuccia’s whim in her ongoing collaboration with Rem Koolhaas’s OMA. Previously it has been clad in plywood and wire mesh, and for winter was wrapped in clingfilm like a supermarket chicken fillet. This time round, the space was carpeted with sea-foam-green and sky-blue rugs, ringed with mirrored cubes and low-slung, scoop-seat upholstered chairs, of the type dotting many a suburban 1970s rec room, as the backdrop to the Miu Miu show for resort – or cruise, or even its Frenchified counterpart croisiere, as the label seems wont to dub their latest offering. That’s a perverse piece of nose-thumbing at the Italian fashion establishment, many of whom have been foaming about the muzzle over Prada’s decision to show its sister line (don’t say “diffusion”) as part of Paris Fashion Week, as opposed to bolstering a depleted Italian schedule.
The thing is, Miu Miu feels French. It’s there in the twisted girlish glee of twee colours and finishes, the oft-abbreviated hemlines, and a decorative hand that veers towards a light-handed, delicate rococo femininity rather than Italianate barocco magnificence. At the height of the aforementioned Milanese brouhaha, Miuccia Prada showed an autumn/winter 2013 collection of Breton-striped jacquards and jauntily knotted neckerchiefs so perversely Parisian it could only be seen as the laying down of a chic gauntlet. In February this year, Miu Miu moved all operations bar design from Milan to Paris’s 8th arrondissement. Showing their croisiere in Paris was a strong, bold statement.
Those are the kind of statements Miuccia Prada likes to make. This collection was one, too. That’s not to say it wasn’t wearable, saleable and adorable. It was all of the above – which is, after all, the point of cruise. Miuccia seemed to get fixated on the birth of the jet set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period she has referenced time and time again. Hence the short shifts, the geometric crochet, the wafting chiffon being buffeted by the wind, the psychedelic prints that could have graced Endora (the magical mother-in-law portrayed by Agnes Moorehead in the television sitcom Bewitched). There were also natty navy suits, sometimes blocked with powdery, “Barbara Cartland eye shadow” blue and buttoned in brash brass, like air-hostess uniforms from a long-defunct mid-century transatlantic airline. In fact, although the cushy, plushy decor that the Miu Miu show was staged amid screamed lounge, it could as easily have been club-class cocktails as Surbiton splendour. Well, the jet set were the ones who originally spawned the notion of cruise in the first place, so it’s only fitting Miuccia paid them homage.
There was another game afoot here. After a duo menswear and pre-spring Prada show in June devoted to that label’s “Classics” (the capitalisation is Miuccia’s, not mine), this felt like a similarly canny and concise distillation of what the Miu Miu label represents. The slightly kitschy 1960s-meeting-1970s vibe, the short lengths, the jangling embellishment of crystals, the off-colour combinations of navy and acidic green or sickly orange and cyclamen: they’re all tried-and-tested Miu Miu tropes, details that have customers flocking in droves. In fact, those details are precisely what consumers demand from Miu Miu. Consumers are very much on Miuccia Prada’s mind – they always are (she’s a savvy businesswoman, as well as one of the world’s true designer greats), but especially so now, and particularly when it comes to Miu Miu. The brand plans to almost double revenue to close to €1 billion by 2016, and are opening 70 additional Miu Miu stores over the next 18 months. They have to stock them with something.
That sounds cold and calculated. It’s not. Miuccia Prada has palpable affection for Miu Miu – a label named after her own moniker. That’s why, rather than ducking out for her customarily curt bow at the close of the Miu Miu show, she kept going this time, marching over to a phalanx of mirrored tables for a sit-down dinner for every one of the show’s guests. Canapés are normal at a Prada show (only at a Prada show), but this was something else entirely.
Entirely appropriate to the collection’s and venue’s vaguely Abigail’s Party slant, the evening was, it seemed, Miuccia’s Party, with guests of the calibre of Gemma Arterton, Freida Pinto, Uma Thurman and Lea Seydoux. And, unexpectedly, Roman Polanski. Is it crass to say the collection had a vague slant of Sharon Tate bubbling under the surface of the psychotropic paisleys, the pussy-bow necklines and billowing sleeves, which could also easily have been filched from the wardrobe department of Rosemary’s Baby? It’s those levels of referencing that give a Prada collection – under either that label or Miu Miu – its substance, its real bite.
Photographer: Olivier Zahm
By Alexander Fury
