Not such a clear vision

A year ago, Miuccia Prada finished Paris Fashion Week as the most acclaimed designer in the profession, this season she has ended it seeming somewhat confused.

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Not to say the collection she showed Tuesday didn’t have some very pretty clothes with a soupcon of edge, just that they all felt quite like several recent Miu Miu ideas. Meaning lots of bras, sport-bras, undies and knickers peeking through multiple half-open dresses and tops.
 
The Italian designer also showed cool knee-length patent leather dirndls and flared skirts, worn with three metallic belts; and paired with knee socks and a signature logo white T-shirt. An item dozen of male and female models more in this co-ed show. Blouses were inevitably held open at the back, and dresses completed with lots of strass.

She blended in elements of active sports – from hooded ankle-length anoraks and coaches’ nylon jackets to a series of track jackets with piping that looked familiar to those of us who have seen recent Willy Chavarria shows. Ahem.
 
Miuccia also employed her old ploy of including cool celebs in her cast, often faintly androgynous – Alexa Chung, Eliot Sumner, Hilary Swank and Willem Dafoe, the latter two both sporting wry grins.

But overall, the show did not have great impact, and followed a Prada show in Milan, which lacked a real clear focus.
 
Signora Prada has been staging art installations at Miu Miu shows for some time. This season, it was ‘Salt Looks Like Sugar’ by Goshka Macuga, a London-based Polish artist. Made up of two mammoth screens projecting a lightweight yarn about two investigative journalists – named Logos and Pathos – who have a tiff, cause one is having an affair. They both work for a newspaper named ‘The Truthless Times’, owned by the Queer Labor Party. Copies of it were left on each seat. None of them had any proper stories, just headlines and decks. Two typical ones: Researchers Report on Readers Reading or Hot Air Releasing False Flairs.
 

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Above the audience heads: copies of the newspaper circulated around a twisting track. Rather ironically, given the number of Gen Z and influence peddlers in the front row, few of whom one imagines had bought a paper these past four weeks of the international runway season.
 
A note on each seat cautioned: “In the context of the post-truth era, where the boundaries between fact and fiction are increasingly blurred, understanding who controls the narrative related to events becomes even more critical.”
 
A fair point. But suggesting that newspapers – as this installation effectively does – are somehow menaces to the veracity is ultimately misleading. As any serious intellectual – which is what Miuccia surely is – should know, the greater threat is unchecked Big Tech. Unlike newspapers which are obliged to stick pretty close to the truth thanks to libel laws, there is no real constraint on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Meta. And until the day that these platforms are not obliged to play by the same rules as old media, new media will continue to be the far greater threat to honesty in public discourse.
 
A pity, Miu Miu didn’t spend a little money explaining that.