A model wears a creation as part of the Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2026 collection presented at Paris Fashion Week. Photo: AP
As France’s government unravelled in another episode of political instability Monday (Oct 6), the cogs of the luxury industry kept turning.
At the Iena Palace in Paris’ 16th arrondissement, Miuccia Prada's Miu Miu offered its own brand of reassurance: business as usual, chic as ever at Paris Fashion Week.
The opener was sober – a deep blue warehouse apron dress, all covered up and precise. It set the tone for a collection that was gamine yet grounded, playful but edged with pragmatism.
Miuccia, a pioneering CEO as well as designer, made it clear: Miu Miu wasn’t just flirtatious this season, it meant business.
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Founded in 1993 as Prada’s irreverent little sister, Miu Miu is the Italian designer’s freer, instinctive outlet.
Where Prada is cerebral, Miu Miu is gamine and skewed-lingerie-as-daywear, bourgeois classics nudged off-kilter, humour threaded through rigour.
Miuccia, who studied political science before taking over the family firm, has long used the label to probe femininity’s codes – how clothes can be both play and armour.
The apron motif returned again and again, recast in pared silhouettes that exposed flashes of skin or gleamed under shiny buttons.
Actor Richard E Grant, in a long tradition of Miu Miu’s celebrity cameos, strode out in a black sheeny leather apron that read like a kinky chef’s uniform. Milla Jovovich followed in a riff on the same theme, softened with black frills.
From there, the show swerved gamine.
Floral minidresses with faintly sporty underpinnings carried the collection toward its finale. Banded frills bisected the bust; geometric torso prints nodded to Balkan or folk references – an echo of the eclectic "mishmash” styling that has long defined the label.
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Across seasons, Miu Miu has thrived on this push-pull: underthings recast as outerwear, bourgeois classics skewed off-kilter, styling accidents elevated into propositions.
It is a house that embraces contradiction – intellectual framing one day, irreverent humour the next.
But if the apron was the uniform of the hour, the larger message was steadiness.
In a turbulent Paris, Prada again mined her vocabulary of femininity – part gamine, part armour – and found a way to make it feel current.
Miu Miu’s formula hasn’t changed, amid collapse all around it. That, for many in the Iena Palace crowd, was precisely the point. – AP
