Miu Miu Injects Beauty into Real Clothes for the Here and Now

For Spring/Summer 2027, Miuccia Prada mixes sports and sophistication, finding “ways to introduce beauty into these real clothes”

It was three decades ago that Miuccia Prada upended and scandalised the fashion industry with a Spring/Summer 1996 collection she called Banal Eccentricity, but that the world remembers as ugly chic. Her premise, in that show, was to bring into fashion the idea of the “bad” so prevalent in cinema, art and culture more broadly. It fundamentally altered ideas of taste – and, indeed, was so good she did it twice (her Autumn collection that year doubled down on the theme). “In fashion, what was well-developed in literature, in movies, in art – was badness. It was so normal. In fashion it was not accepted,” she once told me.

Obviously, times have changed – thanks, mostly, to Prada. The notion of cultivated bad taste, of intentional ugliness, is something that now shapes fashion fundamentally, much to the chagrin of online chattering masses. So Prada elected, characteristically, to contradict herself and push in the opposite direction for her Spring/Summer 2027 Miu Miu collection. Rather than injecting an intentional badness, her stated aim was “to find ways to introduce beauty into these real clothes.” The clothes in question were our vernacular of everyday dress – easy sportswear pieces, boxed-out tweed tailoring with dowdy pleated skirts, battered Wrangler jeans and knitwear, and they had an eminent, actual realness, rather than that fashion gloss. Indeed, the Wrangler jeans were actually upcycled – ones you may find in a vintage store, here reworked. Reworking was a big idea throughout – often, clothes were chopped apart and collaged together with abandon, so the sliced-off lavallière neck of a prissy, mimsy polka-dot blouse may end up detached from its origin and worn as a wrap-around top on an otherwise bare torso, or a delicate embroidered cocktail dress came with a bodice resembling a sports-bra, layered over a long-sleeve go-faster jersey tee. Bathing suit-style shorts peeked out from waistbands, or came out solo.

The main thing was all that sportswear – something Prada has examined often. Indeed, she considers the fusion of sport with fashion one of her main contributions to the canon, shifting perceptions at a molecular level of what luxury may be. “The concept of mixing elements of sports with sophistication is something that has always influenced my work,” she said. “But I have never been so precise, or taken it so far.” Indeed – the collection’s main motif was a big zig-zag of crossed lacing, slapped across the groin of trousers, sides of skirts as fronts of dresses, and taken from the collection’s New Balance sports shoes. The key piece, meanwhile, was a humble jersey sports top, scooped out front and back, incongruously encrusted with chatons of crystal embroidery. Maybe sequins, sometimes printed with patterns that, actually, directly recalled ugly chic in their dreary, wallpapery graphics of hashed geometrics and jarring colour. It was worn as a stand-alone garment, also sometimes as an accessory, and occasionally grafted into a piece, forming the bodice of sweet little Rosemary’s Baby cocktail dresses panelled with more briolette embellishment.

That mix did situate these clothes in the here and now – no one wears just one thing anymore. Prada commented on how dress has pushed to polarities, entirely dressed down or overly gussied-up (my words, not hers), with little in between. By contrast this collection was all about that liminal space and, essentially, about producing clothes that never quite fulfilled either intention. That is something Prada always enjoys – it is how she dresses herself, and how she creates her clothes. She satisfies no one, bar herself.