Reality check: Miu Miu puts the everyday on a pedestal
For Spring-Summer 2027, Miuccia Prada turned the everyday wardrobe into an object of desire, mixing sportswear, sophistication and a cast of real-world characters. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
The reality-driven attitude that has coursed through Miu Miu’s shows in recent years was made for this season’s pragmatic mood. Previous collections have portrayed the imperfection of everyday life, with all the tousled hair and creased clothes that embody it. On Sunday afternoon at Palais d’Iéna, Miuccia Prada paired that sensibility with the intensified hankering for a shoppable real-life wardrobe that has shaped the runways over the last four weeks. Take, for instance, her own Prada show in Milan, where she and Raf Simons presented a proposal of 63 readily shoppable skirts. “The reality of clothing today is this mix: sportswear, casual, normal. But how to make it more interesting, more rich? I wanted to find ways to introduce beauty into these real clothes,” she said after the Miu Miu show. “The concept of mixing elements of sports with sophistication is something that has always influenced my work. But I have never been so precise, or taken it so far.”
The collection essentially comprised the wardrobe we all have and wear these days – heritage tailoring, aged leather pieces, retro sportswear, vintage-feel knitwear and weathered denim – transformed through the coolification machine of Miu Miu. Each of those “normal” staples was optimised, perfected and put on a pedestal not only through the attractive 1970s workwear cuts and lived-in energy that embody the brand, but through the sportswear details that imbued them. Prada lifted the sports lacing native to classic baseball or hockey kits and applied it to the closures of jeans and skirts, and to the busts and hems of stiff, creased dresses. In the latter case, it blurred the lines between the codes of sportswear and historical costume, evoking the lacing of old-world corsetry. Alongside the gem embroidery that adorned sporty tops and bras, the detailing created the elevation Prada wanted to achieve. “Because it’s all about what people wear, I think that maybe we should elevate the normal,” she said.
The idea of presenting an idealised everyday wardrobe extended to Miu Miu’s cast. It included a league of actors, who weren’t just there as celebrity cameos but to make the clothes feel inhabited rather than modelled: real people, or at least people whose identities are well-known beyond the runway. This season, the cast included Jamie Bell, Emma Corrin, Katherine Waterston, Louisa Jacobson, Noah Jupe, Chandler Kinney, Igby Rigney, Emi Thasorn, Ella Bleu Travolta, Hortense de Gromard, Donkey Kid, Bunny Rogers and Olivia Colman, who looked incredible with her grey, windswept hair and leather skirt suit. “We tried to do all young, new faces, and some older women, some men, some different characters. But what I was mainly interested in was people now,” Prada said. Many of the younger actors in that cast belong to a generation whose everyday wardrobes can be as consequential to shopping behaviour as a campaign image. By putting them on the runway, Prada effectively folded that real-life circulation of taste back into the fashion system itself.
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