“Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15 years old or a lady near death,” said Miuccia Prada. Jessica Testa explores the call of contradictions in the fluid figure of the Miu Miu ‘girl’.
Every season, many lovely dresses are shown in many lovely cities. Runways are
Miu Miu, the prickly little sister brand to Prada, has found a way to not be boring. Models with wind-wrecked hair wear turtlenecks over gem-encrusted underwear. (No pants, obviously.) Their feet? Covered in bandages. Their arms? Weighed down by comically overstuffed totes.
This brand sets trends, like the extreme miniskirts ordered up by its creative director, Miuccia Prada, as a kind of anachronistic joke in October 2021. What if your plain, khaki skirt dropped down your hip bones – exposing your midriff like it’s 2001 – with a hem falling slightly below your genitals?
The joke was a lightning bolt shaped like a dollar sign.
A shopping platform called Lyst maintains a well-regarded list of “fashion’s hottest brands,” compiled from user data, search trends and social media chatter. After the miniskirt collection, Miu Miu joined the list at No. 20. Since mid-2022, it has not left the Top 5.
Hotness begets riches. Back in 2021, Miu Miu reported about 401 million euros in sales. By the end of 2023, that figure grew to nearly €649 million. Last month, the Prada Group announced that Miu Miu had reached €530 million (roughly $966 million) in sales in the first half of 2024. This increase of 93%, over the same period last year, comes at a time when similar brands are faltering.
“A significant outperformance,” said Luca Solca, a luxury analyst for Bernstein.
Yet as much as Miu Miu’s growth is a success story, it is also a bit mysterious.
How did it happen? According to Solca, Miu Miu’s style is simply on trend, “adopted the world over,” especially in China. Still, he said, it was “difficult to put the finger on anything specific.”
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Maybe it wasn’t the viral miniskirt or the sparkly underwear or the brand’s astonishing prices. Maybe it was the woman wearing them.
Miu Miu has spent three decades creating an archetype – a character sprung from Miuccia Prada’s fascination with paradoxes. On runways and in advertising, she has been young but old; sexy but not too; kittenish but formidable; realistic in parts but fantastical as a whole.
This “Miu Miu girl” has never resonated more than in recent years. Fashion enthusiasts and the press deploy the phrase in a way incomparable to other brands.
She can be a teenage influencer, a plus-size model or an Oscar-winning actress in middle age. She can be an Australian boy or a Chinese septuagenarian. For a certain shopper, that fluidity is irresistible – an invitation not to be boring – and a powerful sales tool.
Who Is She?
“This one was like Virginia Woolf goes to a beach party,” actor Emma Corrin said after the Miu Miu show in Paris last October. We sat on cerulean carpeted benches facing a glossy white runway.
Minutes earlier, Gigi Hadid had modelled a brown suede skirt and matching jacket. She wore geeky 1960s glasses, her hair half wet and slicked back. Underneath the skirt (pleated, knee-length, sequined, US$9700), she seemed to be wearing men’s drawstring swim bottoms.
Miu Miu’s runways are known for their unexpected casting. Miranda July walked in the same show as FKA twigs in October 2022. One year later, Cailee Spaeny and Troye Sivan shared a runway, the timing coinciding with important moments in their careers (hers, the film Priscilla; his, the album Something to Give Each Other). Corrin starred in the same runway show as singer-songwriter Ethel Cain and model-activist Zaya Wade, two trans women. Angel Haze and Little Simz, both rappers, walked in February alongside Qin Huilan, a 70-year-old retired doctor.
All of them are now considered Miu Miu girls, a phrase used by the fashion critics for at least 20 years but popularised online around 2022 — by which time “girl” had become a common modifier in social media discourse around fashion trends.
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Advertise with NZME.Zaya Wade, the 17-year-old daughter of retired basketball player Dwyane Wade, likes that Miu Miu girl has become part of her identity.
“There’s something about being something,” said Wade, who thinks the phrase denotes youth and modernity — concepts, as opposed to more fixed aesthetics, like maximalism or quiet luxury. “Anybody can be, but not a lot of people are, Miu Miu girls.”
A juvenile edge seems to be key. What else would Sydney Sweeney, Generation Z’s first sex-symbol movie star, have in common with Chloë Sevigny, a gritty downtown lodestar who has modelled for Miu Miu since 1995? Or with Hailee Steinfeld or Elle Fanning, both 14-year-old ingénues when they began working for the brand? Or with Hailey Bieber, proud nepo baby and beauty influencer supreme?
“We all have moments of wanting to be Sydney Sweeney, and then we all have moments of wanting to be Emma Corrin,” offered Ashley Brokaw, the brand’s casting director and, other than Miuccia Prada, the woman arguably most responsible for deciding who becomes a Miu Miu girl. “You want to be a bombshell, and then you feel something different the next day.”
Still, she acknowledged that Miu Miu more often gravitated toward “quirkier” beauty.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but when you see it, you know it,” said Brokaw, who worked for the brand from 2012 to 2014, then returned for the spring 2022 collection, with its viral miniskirts. “Honestly, it’s Mrs. Prada. It’s her. It’s the essence of her. It’s her humour. It’s her girlishness. It’s her playfulness. It’s her.”
Rich on the Inside
In February, I asked Miuccia Prada why she was drawn to contradictions in the Miu Miu girl. Over email, the 75-year-old designer said the ambiguity was a result of a “rich on the inside” personality.
“There is a strength and a tenderness,” she wrote, “for instance, you can want to be beautiful and gentle but also intelligent, political.”
Yet people still struggle to clearly define the Miu Miu girl. Did her ambiguity actually make her unknowable?
“She isn’t unknowable, because she is present in all of us,” she responded. If the Miu Miu girl contradicts herself ... well, so do most people, by Miuccia Prada’s thinking.
The designer proved her point a few weeks later, introducing a more elegant version of the Miu Miu girl in Paris. For the first time in about five years, there were no miniskirts, bra tops or pantsless looks on the runway. Where was the sexy subversion that made the Miu Miu girl seem so young? Was it now in the skinny jeans worn underneath her long fur coat? Were those pearl necklaces and hotel slippers?
“There is a mentality that has always been present at Miu Miu – a sense of freedom, of spontaneity,” Prada had written to me. Or, as she told Vogue after the March show, “Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15 years old or a lady near death.”
Before she was a designer, Prada was a mime, a communist and a student protester. (She holds a doctorate in political science.) When she introduced Miu Miu in 1993 – about five years after releasing her first clothing collection for Prada, her family’s accessories company – the new line became her experimental playground. Miu Miu was her childhood nickname.
“I think Miuccia has always, in her world, been a rebel,” said Guido Palau, hairstylist for Miu Miu for more than 20 years. “And I think the Miu Miu girl is a reflection of her in her youth.”
The brand arrived during a moment in fashion when the sleek perfection of supermodels was giving way to reality, Palau said – to oddness and messiness.
That idea still fuels Miu Miu 30 years on; it can be found in the suggestions of cowlicks (fall 2023) or blisters (spring-summer 2024). Some of these touches are owed to the influential stylist Lotta Volkova, formerly of Balenciaga.
Miu Miu hired Volkova in 2020, the year its current trajectory was set into motion. That April, designer Raf Simons began working at Prada as co-creative director – a pairing that freed Miuccia Prada, who had previously overseen both labels on her own, to spend more time in her playground.
‘She Reads’
There is some agreement about the dominant qualities of a Miu Miu girl. She has a sense of humour. She is vaguely academic.
“Funny,” said Susanna Lau, a journalist and influencer, when asked to describe the archetype. “Smart. I don’t want to say intellectual because that sounds a bit pretentious.”
Brandon Veloria, a vintage dealer who collects Miu Miu handbags for his New York and Los Angeles stores, thinks “she’s in on the joke,” he said. “She’s politically interested. She reads.”
Indeed she reads. Or at least wants to read. In June, Miu Miu erected temporary kiosks in a few major cities – there was one outside Casa Magazines in the West Village neighbourhood of Manhattan in New York City – handing out Popsicles and free books as part of a new Summer Reads initiative. The titles included Persuasion by Jane Austen and two Italian feminist novels from 1906 and 1952. Lau stood in line for books in London.
“It’s a very obvious point to be making, but I think she feels passionately about knowledge and power,” said Lau, herself a Miu Miu client and collector. (Lau has no current business relationship with the company, though she has previously worked on a few brand projects.)
In its most recent financial presentation, the Prada Group pointed to Miu Miu’s strategy to reach consumers beyond clothing – through culture and community programming, like Summer Reads. The brand had already, for 13 years, been commissioning short films from female directors, including Agnès Varda and Janicza Bravo, in a series called Women’s Tales.
Can this strategy help maintain the astronomic sales momentum? Is maintaining it even possible?
“Clearly, the growth rate that you’ve seen in the last quarter cannot last forever,” said Mario Ortelli, a luxury adviser at Ortelli & Co. “There will be a normalisation, and it’s important that management continues to find a way to keep the point of view of Miu Miu interesting for the consumers.”
The Miu Miu girls are hopeful: “It’s a really tricky landscape, and they’re bucking the trend because they actually have something to say,” Lau said.
“You can’t say that for a lot of brands at the moment,” she added. “Even if the clothes are not for you, at least it’s tapping into something.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jessica Testa
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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