A look into the everlasting obsession with the Miu Miu archetype, the impending death of girlhood-inspired fashion, and our favourite contemporary collections at the intersection of joy and nostalgia.
The Miu Miu ideal is a woman beholden to becoming.
In 2022, she lived in half-states between the structured demands of the workplace (her slacks lazily dropping off the waist, simultaneously awkward and lax) and an instinct for recklessness (hems frayed like scored in a burst of passion, work socks stuffed into chic patent stilettos). Her office wear is cropped and creased; she is Innocence Shrugged. Three years on, and not much has touched our girl — this year, she’s going on holiday — and the carefree heart of Prada’s younger sister can be heard beating through every collection.
You can easily picture her off the runway as this wide-eyed emblem of tenacity à la Cindy Sherman’s girlish, bright-eyed starlets. Her fashion reveals her first encounter with a world outside herself, constructed by people unlike herself and, ultimately, almost as naïve as she to everything she values as being her “self.”
The reconciling of outer and inner, work and play, tenderness and constraint is, for me, everything that has come to spark love for Miuccia Prada’s youngest. This contrast Miuccia herself defines as sourced from the “spontaneity” of the creative process, and this spontaneity I define as a joy bound to, yet distinctly not restrained to, youth.
Looking backward to fashion trends of the near past you will encounter women who refuse to look forward to adulthood. The infantile girl-consumer has been operated on extensively by writers far more in the know than I with the mechanisms of the coquette capitalist fetish, so I'll spare you the autopsy notes. Indeed, this coquette preoccupation seems to wane and wax in and out of the trend cycle — we are never quite done with her, or rather, we do not know quite where to go. Narratives of victimhood hold saccharine fashion sacrosanct, yet ultimately reveal the symptoms of a culture sick with a simulacral nostalgia.
For the twenty-something dedicant, aspiring to the high-end saints of trite femininity seems to be the cure. To carry with you girlish beginnings, every dull moment of the present is simply an opportunity for another pink satin ribbon. Yet, this refusal to engage with the reality of the adult world is nothing more than a denial of any beauty it may possibly serve to offer. In the trickle-down from luxury market to self-conscious urbanity, the feminine ideal becomes polluted, and the seed of subversion that keeps Miu Miu oh-so-fresh (its spontaneity and in this, joy), sprouts into something a little less pink and pleasant, something that I cannot quite wrap a bow around. Unfortunately, as much as the modern girl-woman may strive to eventually morph into the Miu Miu ideal, the operator of the sign and the sign itself appear to exist in two completely different realities.
In adorning the costuming of a homogenised girlishness, the camera-still image of our youth becomes benign, innocent, and familiar. The future is rendered malignant rather than evolving. Womanhood presents no space for the young woman to grow into but rather a resignation to which one is condemned to dwell. For me, this space is the absence of hope and perhaps it is this absence that underlies the resistance to overcoming girlhood.
In this sorry scenario, no other saviour will do but Issey Miyake’s hopeful young woman, all dressed up in Pleats Please.
Fashion writer Madeleine Rothery’s interview with long-time aficionados of Miyake basks in a rare sensitivity as they reflect on the brand’s presence throughout their early adulthood; Charlene Prempeh comments, “I wore a lot of it when I was pregnant, and I loved how it moved with my body […] I love the idea that I’ll be wearing it in my mid-twenties and my mid-eighties because, not only does it move with your body shape, it moves with your life.”
Across Miyake’s lines, the colours and rhythms of life are abstracted and, in the dynamism of material, form is freed from adult constraint, rendering you vibrant and deliciously youthful. Here, the spontaneity that colours youth for Miu Miu is sacralised in every leap, bounce, and twirl. The feminine archetype has grown out of awkwardness — she moves with the current.
Miyake’s nostalgic device is not concealed in any signs and signifiers — no bows and frills here — but in the perspective with which he asks the wearer to carry with her through early adult years into motherhood, if she so pleases. Miyake offers you movement and asks only for you to be unrestrained, to revel in experiences unique to womanhood, and to bound into the future with the unchecked earnestness of which you gaze into the past.
Whilst Miyake delights in the joy of the present, Jacobs’ allows for a moment of silence and stillness; cartoonish dresses in doll-like proportions drift down the runway, halted in time. Models, as if asleep, wear kitsch eye coverings to the effect of sleepy lids, and, in their hazy daydreams, we encounter our childhood selves.
The new Jacobs ideal is a girl beholden to becoming.
A child steps into her mother’s shoes, still much too big, and plays pretend; Jacobs’ girl adorns the garments of her icons, Marilyn and Minnie alike, and in this, nothing is held back in honouring the simple splendour of potential. Jacobs affirms at once it is not enough to merely have access to these memories nor is it ideal to live in them permanently, but we must use the past as a spring for inspiration, with childlike joy as a well of creativity. Where the consumer-dictated ideal fails in its over-generalisations (the embrace of generic “girlhood” much too easy to digest), Jacobs asks us to lean into the specifics of our unfiltered daydreams prior to the hunger for bowage. These are not dreams to live in but to make real. Here, the gift of womanhood becomes the gift of creation out of nostalgic temporalities into a new self, into new presents.
All ideals present the same conclusion: There is no one, definitive way to be a woman. But you must be. You must enjoy the awkwardness of the present with unabashed spontaneity; you must luxuriate in the movements of life and family in all its sweet nostalgia; and, you must remember your own ideals of woman, personal and hopeful. But you must be a woman. 🌀
Leola B is a writer and budding art historian based in London. You can find her toeing the line between scholar and starlet across all socials as @babeofprey.