Miu Miu’s
Value on Work
Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2026 collection.
Rows of industrial Formica tables stood in for seats at Monday afternoon’s Miu Miu show in the Palais d’Iéna. It opened with the German actress Sandra Hüller, her makeup neutral and her hair flattened as if it had been trapped under a cap. She was dressed in a sturdy chore jacket with a leather collar and cuffs worn under a simple apron. The latter became the focal point of a collection devoted to work. “In fashion, we always talk about glamour and rich people, but we have to also recognize the lives of somebody different,” Miuccia Prada said after the show.
Styled like characters in a play, her models — who also included Milla Jovovich and Richard E. Grant — looked like socialist factory workers from the postwar era. Work suits, open-weave knits, and plastrons cut from shirts or jumpers were invariably overlaid with aprons and lining-like gilets. Prada had taken inspiration from the documentary work of the Great Depression photographer Dorothea Lange, and Helga Paris who photographed everyday life in East Germany. The costumes of Björk as a 1960s machine operator in Dancer in the Dark came to mind.
MIU MIU
Prada has often spoken about giving value to regular jobs in a time when human worth seems to have become synonymous with fame and unique occupations. At Miu Miu, she demonstrated it by lionizing her workwear, prettifying it with florals or figuratively raising its value with precious-looking surface decoration. Among the aprons were all the trappings of Miu Miu’s ever-increasing appeal on the fashion market: great aged leather jackets, little worky lace dresses, and braided janitor’s belts that probably already have a waiting list.
Of course, it’s easy for people who design fabulous fashion for a living — and those of us who write about it — to talk about the value of “normal” jobs. But Prada’s message is never that we should compromise our professional dreams; rather, it’s that there aren’t “good” or “bad” jobs, or more or less prestigious ones. By elevating the unassuming workwear uniforms that often inspire her, and certainly did today, she aligns the professions they embody with her own brand value.
Within that transition, there’s a lot of socialist discourse, a territory that isn’t foreign to Prada who was involved in the Italian Communist Party and the women’s rights movement in the 1970s. Now, on the American right — and some places in Europe — basic ideas of welfare are being categorized as “communist.” A politician like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani — who practices regular European democratic socialism — is being labelled as some sort of socialist threat to liberty. As populism and nationalism continue to rise, Prada’s fire seems ignited anew.
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