Miuccia Prada rarely draws any direct line to the artists she commissions for her Miu Miu runway sets at the Palais d’Iena.
“We are both part of the same world. They think their own way. I think my own way,” she said after her spring show on Tuesday. “But it always works because we are interested in reality, in today.”
Printing presses rolled furiously on Polish artist Goshka Macuga’s giant video screens, and copies of The Truthless Times dangled overhead on whirring conveyors. Seated on corrugated steel benches, some guests cracked open copies of the broadsheet to check the impassive headlines: “Archaeologists Digging for Answers Unearth Questions” or, in the Arts and Culture section, “Humanities Leader Says Man Should Follow, Not Lead.”
Macuga’s disquieting work suggests that “the truth has to be found by individual investigation rather than available in commonly distributed sources. Misconceptions and aims to communicate are forever entangled,” according to an explanatory leaflet left on each seat.
So what to make of Miu Miu’s latest jumble of disparate fashion elements, which this season skewed infantile with bloomers, petticoats, pinafores, T-shirts that closely resembled onesies, and gauzy little white dresses sometimes left unbuttoned at the back?
Mixed in were pleated boarding school skirts, diner-waitress dresses, Maytag repairman trousers, funky two-tone windbreakers and boxy coats in garish ’70s wallpaper prints.
Each outfit seemed to require some individual investigation to divine the wearing occasion, and the wearer’s intention. One guest thought about the messy, conflicted Portia character on season two of “The White Lotus” — partly on duty, partly on vacation, partly on the prowl. Another found all the improperly fastened, infantile clothing worn by very young models borderline disturbing.
On many outfits, gray or navy sweaters were tightly swaddled around the waist, with the kind of lacy collars you can find at Bonpoint poking out here and there.
“Wearing things in the wrong way,” Prada shrugged, “it was a way of being spontaneous.”
Not that the whole show skewed juvenile. Adding some grown-up chic to the proceedings were Hilary Swank beaming in a glossy brown coat, and Willem Dafoe in a navy one, grinning one of his inimitable grins.
