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MiuMiu Tales and tellers
I’ve said it once on this blog and I’ll say it twice: it’s Miuccia’s world and we are living in it. If you follow all the right fashion girlies on Instagram, you may have seen that she has amazed once again with the Miu Miu “Tales and Tellers”, a project part of the Art Basel Paris Public Program, hosted this year in the Palais d’léna. The project was mainly directed by two important women in art, already known for having worked with the Fondazione Prada before: the polish interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Staged in the amphitheater of the Palais, Miu Miu’s exhibit consisted in a mixture of live performances, all the Miu Miu Women Tales done from 2011 till now shown on screens around the place and multiple panels hosting conversations among women in cinema, from filmmakers to actresses and artists, who discussed their view of their work from a female perspective, sharing what womanhood means to them and what are their adversities, aspirations, and dreams both in their career and personal life, all in light of today’s everyday changing society, integrating a discussion on new technologies, AI and ChatGPT as tools that shape the way we experience and feel the world both cognitively and emotionally. The events took place from October 16th to October 20th.
All this was not born from day to night. The Miu Miu Women’s tales, now amounting to twenty-eight, is a project that Signora Miuccia started in 2011, in collaboration with female filmmakers and actresses from all around the world. You can find them on MiuMiu’s youtube page, along with behind the scenes and interviews with the cast and the filmmakers, to get deeper and deeper into the eye-opening works. The project is described as follows on the brand’s website:
Since its inception, Miu Miu has explored femininity, vanity and the female gaze via women narrating women. This has initiated a rich, thought-provoking analysis of how women view themselves and the world around them. Hence, in 2011, the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series began. It offered female filmmakers a significant platform to present their unique views on the plurality of womanhood. Taking a comprehensive reappraisal of ‘vanity’ as a point of departure, the celebrated short-film series most importantly afforded opportunities for these filmmakers to challenge and overcome through their practice.
Last April, MiuMiu had also hosted a Literary Club at the Circolo Filologico Milanese for a two-day discussion about feminism in literature, which panels have inspired the Tales and Tellers ones. On the first day, the reading and following discussion was on “Forbidden notebook”, the diaristic discovery of her interiority and emotions of a 1950s middle class woman, written in 1951 by Alba De Cespedes, an Italian writer and partisan sadly forgotten by the critics for many years. The panel brought out themes such as motherhood, marriage and the way in which women have for long been deprived of a private space where to collect their thoughts and acknowledge their emotions and societal condition, making a confrontation between how things worked in the 1950s and how they are going now. All the panelists, Tina Kunakey, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Durastanti, Sheila Heti and Lou Stoppard, agreed on the power of a private diary to help women, who have for long been voiceless both publicly and privately. I have personally read the book, after watching the panel on YouTube, and enjoyed it deeply! Second day panel, hosted by Bel Powely, Selby Wynn Schwartz, Viola di Grado, Xialou Guo and Zing Tsjeng, instead, was about “A woman”, written in 1906 by Sibilla Aleramo, pseudonym of Marta Felicina Faccio detta Rina, an Italian journalist, novelist and poetess. The book, an autobiography of Aleramo, pictures the condition of women between the 19th and 20th century.
But what the Tales and Tellers exhibition is really a continuum of is the SS2025 Miu Miu runway. MiuMiu has a long story of collaborations with artists of all forms when staging its runways and this year Miuccia was no less intending to collaborate with an artist to create something that, through clothes and art, could make the guests reflect on our society. Last year, for example, she collaborated with the south-Korean performance artist Jeong Geomhyung.
“Salt looks like sugar” was the name of the runway, staged in Paris on October 1 at the Palais d’Iléna like the Art Basel exhibit, and of the work of Goshka Macuga, which accompanied the fashion show, based around the doubts over our relationship with truth and deceit in the era of digital disinformation. A rotary press attached to the ceiling prints “The Truthless Times”, Macuga’s newspaper. The paper is made not of articles but titles, followed by QR codes, and advertisements without pictures, just descriptions on a light blue page: “A cosmetic bottle floats in front of an unwrinkled face. Logo”, “In a dingy urban landscape, a can of air freshener emits a triangle of greenery. Logo”, “A recognizable figure sits in a corner cradling a leather purse. Logo”. The titles are deceiving, made to elicit our everyday lower capacity of concentration, both on online and offline newspapers, suggesting that we should concentrate more on the contents that we consume. The newspaper was paired with a narrative film that introduced the show, whose protagonists, Pathos and Logos, undercover journalists of The Truthless Times, live in an era where truth manipulation is on the agenda.
As Silvia Schirinzi wrote on Rivista Studio, “the questions posed by Goshka Macuga well accompanied a collection where Miuccia Prada has tried to get her hands back on what interests her the most, which is the concept of vanity, especially feminine one, and how this connects to a lot of deceits of our daily life: towards ourselves, towards others, towards the reality we consume on digital screens.” She chose to make a youthful collection, compared to the previous one, because youth is a “moment of absolute truth”, says Schirinzi, when minds are not yet deceived by the world's stimula, blank like the cotton dresses that opened the show.
[Cover credits go to MiuMiu]
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