This past weekend, if you were walking through Shanghai’s Jing’An neighborhood—with the gilded roofs of its famous ancient temple site in one direction, and the teeming storefronts of the West Nanjing Road in the other—you might have spotted something a little curious. Wandering through the gates and under the colonnades of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, crowds of smartly dressed locals were clutching takeaway coffee cups in pastel shades with matching stacks of books tucked under their arms, chattering around the fountains in the courtyards or along the sweeping staircases that led up to the building’s western wing. Look a little closer, and you’d have noticed that a number of them were wearing the unmistakable arches of a specific brand’s logo: Miu Miu.
After two years serving as a reliable highlight of the events surrounding Salone del Mobile in Milan each spring, Miu Miu Literary Club landed in Shanghai, where, over a series of days, it hosted panels of writers and thinkers to discuss a handful of books by women writers selected by Mrs. Prada herself, punctuated by performances from musicians and poets. Following on from the theme of women’s education that anchored this year’s Milan outing in April, the Shanghai edition featured Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables and Fumiko Enchi’s The Waiting Years, with the addition of The Fall of the Pagoda by Eileen Chang, the trailblazing writer whose body of work has made her one of the most revered Chinese novelists of the 20th century.
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As Zhang Pinjing, a professor at the School of Humanities, Tongji University, and the figure tasked with assembling the lineup of speakers, put it: “Chang is a defining figure not only among women writers but in modern Chinese literature as a whole. Her work is essential reading.” Having made my way through most of The Fall of the Pagoda on my journey over, I can attest to that: charting the journey of a young woman from an aristocratic family on the decline through a rapidly changing Shanghai in the 1920s and ’30s, it’s both riveting and eerily timeless. And in keeping with the de Beauvoir and Enchi novels, it remains one of the writer’s lesser-known works—suiting the project’s spirit of reviving “what you might call overlooked gems,” per Pinjing.
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The growth of Miu Miu Literary Club feels fortuitously timed: There’s been a rising fashion-world fixation on literature over the past few seasons, with models launching their own book clubs, designers printing extracts of books across clothes, and brands selling statement tote bags decorated with the covers of classic novels. As always, however, where others zig, Mrs. Prada zags. In a similar vein to the other major pillar of Miu Miu’s cultural programming, the long-running Women’s Tales initiative, which commissions women filmmakers to create original short films, the Literary Club takes its mission seriously. There are conversations between women writers that anyone can attend—and, through its Summer Reads program, Miu Miu has distributed thousands of copies of each book spotlighted through the Literary Club to readers for free, via pop-ups around the globe. (So too does it slyly flesh out themes explored in the label’s collections: It was hard not to identify a throughline between the sartorial signifiers of domestic life embedded in Miu Miu’s spring 2026 collection—aprons, pinafores, housecoats—and the inner lives of the maids and concubines surveyed in Enchi’s novel, in particular.)
So, then, to the talks, which took place within an airy, light-filled hall decorated in the style of a mid-century Milanese library, a jewel-toned yellow sofa surrounded by Marcel Breuer chairs and set against a rippling crimson velvet curtain. First up was a discussion of The Inseparables, de Beauvoir’s heart-wrenching semi-autobiographical novel about a passionate friendship between teenage girls that was only published in 2020. “The scaffolds they want to break free from can still be felt now, and the plights they wanted to escape still exist,” observed panelist Yuan Xiaoyi, a scholar of French literature. “Even when she’s writing fiction, de Beauvoir is still a realist writer.” (The assembled group, which included the book’s Chinese translator, Cao Dongxue, also made special mention of de Beauvoir’s 1955 trip to the country with Jean-Paul Sartre, making them some of the first academics to visit after the People’s Republic of China was established. “So she is an old friend of ours,” said Xiaoyi, to a swell of laughter from the crowd.)
Next, it was time for an appropriately East-meets-West lunch—miniature Wagyu beef sandwiches and zucchini ciabatta, washed down with iced teas or negronis, depending on your constitution—and a stirring performance from Chen Sijiang, frontwoman of the Chengdu-based indie band Hiperson, before an afternoon session on Chang’s novel. It was this talk—which coincided with the 30th anniversary of Chang’s death, and began with a reading from the novel by actor Li Gengxi, the Miu Miu ambassador who stars in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, a notable hit from this year’s Cannes Film Festival—that served as the day’s thematic lynchpin. Novelist Di An, who led the discussion, was unafraid to offer her critiques of the book—in particular, her dissatisfaction with Chang’s portrayal of the central character’s mother—while the Malaysian Chinese author Li Zishu pointed out the parallels she discovered between the protagonist’s journey and her own liberation as a woman, speaking frankly about her (amicable) divorce and how she left her stable career as a journalist to pursue her dreams of becoming a writer. “It’s not selfish to pursue our own dreams,” she said. “I want to help minimize that guilt.”
If the reactions from those listening intently on the front row were anything to go by, it was a message that hit home—for the students, the actors and musicians clad in their Miu Miu finery, and the silver-haired professors in attendance alike. Pingjin was careful about curating a lineup of panelists who were “both writers and thinkers,” she says—much like de Beauvoir herself. “I wanted speakers who could represent women at different stages of growth.” She found herself pleasantly surprised by the discussion generated around de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre, with many of the younger women objecting to his treatment of her. “This shift in perspective moved me,” she said. “It reflects how women’s understanding of relationships has clearly evolved.”
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It also spoke to what’s made the Miu Miu Literary Club—and, indeed, the Women’s Tales program—such a roaring success: there’s nothing like a good story to bring people together, and to spark conversation. “We wanted to be able to speak from the text outward—from the novels themselves into the realities of our present moment, in China as well as globally,” Pingjin added.
Conversations about the books were in full swing later that evening, as the hall in which the book club took place was transformed into a very different kind of club, with disco lights twinkling across the ceilings while the buzzy alt-pop musician Lexie Liu performed a handful of her hits to an enthusiastically cheering crowd. But heading back out into the corridor, I noticed a library space tucked away at one end of the wing was still occupied by a dozen or so attendees, poring over their books to the distant echo of Liu’s music. “The goal was never simply to interpret the books, but to use them as bridges,” Pingjin had told me earlier in the day. On that front, mission accomplished.
