MIU MIU UPCYCLED: Fragments of a fashion discourse

From The Craft Issue

When fashion designer Miuccia Prada meets the gaze of Hollywood costume designer Catherine Martin, their shared language becomes image, texture, and memory.

Miuccia Prada has never hidden her love for cinema. She has long embraced it as a space for experimentation, a medium for storytelling and cultural transmission. After Women’s Tales, the series of short films directed by female filmmakers, Miu Miu unveils a new project in 2025: Grande Envie, created in collaboration with American costume designer, producer, and set decorator Catherine Martin. “Baz Luhrmann and I have been collaborating with Miuccia Prada for over thirty years — on films like Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsby, and, more recently, on the costumes for Priscilla Presley in Elvis,” says the four-time Academy Awardwinning Hollywood icon. For the Miu Miu Upcycled campaign — the brand’s vintage iteration launched in 2020 — Catherine Martin steps behind the camera for the very first time.

Sentimental Upcycling

Grande Envie is where Jacques Henri Lartigue’s Riviera meets the refined intelligentsia of Saltburn. A French château in summer, a myriad of Miu Miu Girls — young women in bloom, carefree and radiant, dressed in delicate ensembles — and Willem Dafoe as a widowed count, haunted by the memory of his lost wife (Daisy Ridley). A film rooted in the interwar period, a time filled with paradoxes, where ghosts of the past flirt with a joyful, carefree youth. “I chose to set the story in the 1920’s and 30’s, because this period is fascinating to me”, explains Catherine Martin. “The traumatic aftermath of the First World War coincided with the rise of fascism, but at the same time, there were revolutionary social advances for women. The worlds of art, literature, and photography were all trying to make sense of the birth of a new world. France provided in this interval a fertile ground for artists.”

In this setting where past and present intertwine with subtle precision, Grande Envie captivates with a razor-sharp sense of style and a wardrobe that is both sensual and playfully subversive. “With Miu Miu and Prada, Miuccia Prada created disruptive brands, in the sense that they question the value of traditional beauty and usefulness,” notes Catherine Martin. “Upcycled reflects the brand’s core value: creating clothing that is both relevant and useful today. By combining materials that might otherwise have been discarded, garments gain new value and significance for contemporary wearers.” In this sartorial wardrobe, vintage is transformed into one-of-a-kind pieces — new icons of contemporary dress.

Since its launch in 2020, Miu Miu Upcycled has championed a circular and conscious approach to design, breathing new life into forgotten garments. Each piece, meticulously handcrafted, becomes an aesthetic manifesto — a patchwork of influences and styles that subtly tells a story of fashion and the social upheavals that have shaped it. A vintage petticoat, paired with a jersey, becomes a two-fabric slip dress trimmed with silk. Archive striped T-shirts, adorned with lace intarsia, are reimagined as micro-skirts — a silhouette that became iconic after its jubilant debut in the Spring-Summer 2022 show, when pocket linings peeked out from beneath pleated skirts. The college girl aesthetic — part craft, part DIY — has captured the imagination of Gen Z, who embraced the micro-trend on TikTok in a frenzy of slicing and reshaping.

The Miu Miu Effect

Disrupting codes, playing with paradoxes, provoking the establishment — this has been Miuccia Prada’s ethos since she launched her eponymous brand in 1978, followed by Miu Miu in 1993. The latter has since forged its own distinct path, shaped by its creator and pygmalion, who once said: “Prada is what I am, and Miu Miu is who I would like to be.” The name itself comes from her childhood nickname, “Miu Miu.” From her elegant Milanese office — where an aluminum slide by Carsten Höller, The Slide No. 5, takes pride of place — Miuccia Prada has infused the brand with the spirit of an eternal teenager. Slightly rebellious. The famous Miu Miu Girl. She’s described as charming, free-spirited, mischievous. Intelligent, but never snobbish. Offbeat, yet always right on time. In 2024, New York Times journalist Jessica Testa called Miu Miu “the most wanted girl in fashion” — its most fully realized archetype.

With a fresh, irreverent energy and a kind of fashion nostalgia that feels deeply contemporary — indie couture with a Y2K twist — the brand seduces with its ironylaced wardrobe, cerebral eclecticism, and audacious cuts. Not to mention its international creative circle, composed of cutting-edge artists, intellectuals, and architects. Finally, Miu Miu is the art of contrast. The fusion of micro-style and macro-vision. Between the incisive pen of American writer Miranda July and the experimental rap of British artist Little Simz. Between an uninhibited Gen Z in full Brat Summer mode and a global intelligentsia strutting down the runway. “Virginia Woolf going to a beach party,” as actor and brand ambassador Emma Corrin put it after the Spring-Summer 2025 show at Paris Fashion Week.

With Grande Envie, Miuccia Prada and Catherine Martin bring to life a world shaped by art and paradox, with its gaze firmly set on the future — a future where fashion, like culture and cinema, remains a powerful voice for change. As Catherine Martin reminds us: “It’s important to remember that, even in politically complex times, humanity must keep hope, art, and a sense of adventure alive in the world.” A word to the wise.