SimplyAbuDhabi VII

1 6 2 S I M P LY A B U DH A B I History:- A different expression of one singular vision, Miu Miu is the instinctive, playful counterpart to Prada. Offspring of the same design mind, the two lines share environment, twistedly bourgeois spirit and even the set of rules they obey, but MiuMiu deliberately, mercilessly breaks them. Miuccia Prada brings femininity to the extreme with Miu Miu, in a light, quixotic way. Right from the start, in 1992, Miu Miu was in fact intended as her private territory of expression; a playground. Apropos, the designer chose her own family nickname to christen the label. At a time when Prada was reaching its minimalistic Zenith, Miu Miu offered the symmetrical opposite: a naïve, almost bucolic take on dressing-up. But that was just the start. Believing in fashion’s endlessly morphing, ever-changing nature, Miuccia Prada soon tied glamorous restlessness to the Miu Miu DNA, making it sensual and rebellious, in a well-to-do kind of way. The feeling MiuMiu conveys is always spirited, young, meaning with the adjective a state of mind, not a matter of age. As a designer, Prada focuses on mind sets that inform styles. For her, the immaterial always shapes the material. Miu Miu has been a wandering, fashionable nomad for quite a while. Shows have been staged in New York, London and Milan. But it was with the final settlement in the Paris calendar, in March of 2006, that it came into a force of its own. Confronting the fashion world in its undisputed capital, Miu Miu used the city’s magnificent sets as a backdrop to its very own experimentalism, all the while conveying Parisian couture savoir-faire through an unprecedented stress on elegance and sophistication, with a quirk. Miu Miu is avant-garde in spirit: concepts of indoors/outdoors, city/countryside, masculine/feminine, couture/street, past/future, ugly/beautiful are blurred; prints create ruptures, peaks and counterpoints; shoes are focal, always adding an odd, ironic element; boundaries between high and low, trashy and elegant are deliberately ignored. The vernacular of bourgeois dressing is continuously turned on its head; junctions between clashing parts, however, are shown rather than hidden. Painstaking attention to detail creates the perfect frame to insert oddities, contrarieties and deliberate errors. The recipe is all about wit and esprit de finesse. Turning fashion into a state of mind, Miuccia Prada has built a world around Miu Miu. She invented not only a trademark style, but also a new way to communicate. Ground breaking advertising campaigns have set the pace, in this sense. Initially shot in neo-realistic fashion by Corinne Day and Ellen Von Unwerth, the Miu Miu adverts soon developed their uniqueness thanks to the choice of celebrities as models, the first being Drew Barrymore in 1995, followed by Chloe Sevigny. From then on, the cast changed constantly, and an abstractly narrative style became the label’s trademark: KimBasinger, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Vanessa Paradis, to name a few, all starred, shot in darkly- lit, cinematic situations full of theatrical tension. After a few seasons of going back to real models, Miu Miu has opted for the Oscar-nominated young actress Hailee Steinfeld, shot by Bruce Weber, as the muse of the new Miu Miu Fall/Winter 2011 advertising campaign, and for Mia Wasikowska, shot by David Sims in classical portraiture situations for Spring/Summer 2012. The attempt, always, is to define a vision of femininity that is fluid and uncontrived. A dash of airy nonchalance is the bottom note of the Miu Miu ever-changing essence. Restlessness keeps things from settling into a staid formula. For more information please visit http://www.miumiu.com