When Miuccia Prada reached out to her friend Catherine Martin and suggested that they collaborate on a capsule collection for Miu Miu, Martin immediately thought of the graceful, supremely sporty, sometimes slightly androgynous fashions you might have seen in the South of France in the 1920s. “It was this idea of the world between the wars,” Martin muses. “You have a lot of expatriate artists like the Fitzgeralds going to live on the Riviera because it was inexpensive, and the weather was beautiful, and you got to escape to a more hedonistic place where lots of things were possible.”
Martin, a much-lauded costume and production designer (four Academy Awards! six BAFTAs! a Tony!), has been escaping the rules for decades. She had also worked with Prada before—on costumes for The Great Gatsby and Elvis, both directed by her husband, Baz Luhrmann. (Martin is currently working with him on an upcoming film about Joan of Arc.) She was instantly taken with the idea of Upcycled by Miu Miu, the series of special collections first launched in 2020 that have included reworked secondhand dresses, a collaboration with Levi’s, and a group of denim and patched handbags. The far-from-modest proposal informing Upcycled by Miu Miu is its commitment to circular consumption—and doesn’t it make perfect sense that this brand, so beloved by young consumers, would take a stand on an issue so close to their hearts? Who says being glamorous means you have to be wasteful?
Even though the project is fiercely forward-facing, Martin looked into the mirror of the past for inspiration. She gleefully embraced upcycled jersey and denim, sourced from vintage markets all over the world, along with gossamer lace rescued from pre-loved lingerie, and employed these fabrics in everything from a rowing blazer fit for punting on the Cam to a sailor-collar jacket slated for Tadzio in Death in Venice.
If it would be a challenge to create a collection that eschewed the vast range of materials Martin can access for her film work and relied instead on a narrower roster, she was all in. Then again, the collection is full of lovely surprises—just take the cashmere in the mix, which Martin says is the product of amazing new technologies: “They can either break down existing yarn and respin it, or just use bits of fluff…. They can take those scraps and remake them into garments.” In Martin’s case, this reinvigorated cashmere shows up in cheerful oversized striped pullovers.
She began this work by making up characters. “I wrote three tiny little paragraphs about them, and kind of gave them a world, and then I did some storyboards and sent them over to Miu Miu.” The distinctive, if imaginary, individuals she envisioned in those early storyboards come alive in the short film that she made—her first, in fact—to illustrate the collection. It features a cast who might be the louche descendants of those expat bohemians loafing in Saint-Tropez a century ago. The players drifting through this dreamscape include Daisy Ridley, Eliot Sumner, Willem Dafoe, and a host of other beautiful people clad in gauzy frocks and provocative bralettes.
What unites these contemporary sybarites with their stylish forebears is a powerful longing for freedom. In those long-ago halcyon days, Martin says, “you basically see the modern world as we know it coming into being—the liberation of women being able to wear their underwear as outerwear after everything being so hidden for so long, and that idea of liberation from corsets, and then the bias-cut dresses being so shape-conscious—women were not ashamed of their bodies anymore.”
With the launch of this collaboration, you, too, can proudly swan around this summer in a flimsy slip dress that started life as an Italian silk bedsheet, now enlivened with a crush of vintage lace added to extend its length, and then—surprise—sewn atop a T-shirt. And if a certain beloved swatch of fabric was in places almost too frail and shredded, well, would that have bothered Zelda Fitzgerald, pirouetting in the sand at la plage de la Garoupe?
“We’ve used the good bits—and then added other bits to make it wearable and precious,” Martin says, adding that the results are meant to be not just playful but also “so completely disruptive. And I love that idea.”
