March 16, 2012 |
FROM THE VAULT (WINTER / SPRING 2012)
These are not mere sunglasses. Sunglasses do not inspire films. Miu Miu does not make sunglasses. This is “eye art”. The camera pans to a boat, one of those old riverboats, in the middle of nowhere. The sun is rising. A cupboard door opens and out crawls, well, sort of sprawls and crawls, this girl. It’s very disjointed. As though she’s hatching out of an egg. Or breaking out of her chrysalis. Every time she pulls out a limb it sort of snaps back in a broken way. The boat is populated with these girls. They have something of a young Joan Crawford about them. It could be the clothes – they’re dressed in those 1940s flower-print dresses from last season. It could also be the hair. It has that 1940s roll to it. They don’t talk. They just move in a robotic-type fashion. They drink bleach on ice in a martini glass, they have a fur clutch that houses something that, every once in a while, moves in an ominous fashion and causes a mild look of distress to register on their faces. Something drowns. Their eyelashes flutter as though they were about to short-circuit. They’re like an army of alien fembots. They all wear Miu Miu “eye art”. It gives their faces a sort of fly-like appearance. When they move there’s this buzzing sound that is similar to that of a swarm of bees approaching. Then, suddenly, they disappear. Only their clothes and lashes remain. Who they are, where they’re from and what has happened on this boat we’ll never know. The film is the second chapter of the Miu Miu tales series and is directed by Lucrecia Martel. It’s a cross between a 1940s film noir horror and Cape Fear. It’s weirdly unsettling. Very surreal. And the most ingenious way to premiere your new eye art (as we said earlier, you can’t call these sunglasses). The delicate gold wire that holds together the frames of the pale pink lenses. Frames, translucent wedges of tortoiseshell and glitter that appear almost suspended midair over the face. As a rule, sunglasses tend not to resemble a hovering sculpture. You don’t name them Noir and have them star in a film about a lost army of surreal alien fembots. Hence these being rechristened. Who wants sunglasses anyway?
by Natalie Dembinska
