As you’ll notice, I’m not sending a communiqué from London this week. Instead, I spent the weekend at the 70th Venice International Film Festival (my first), whizzing up the Grand Canal by motorboat to and from the Lido, trying to make out what it’s all about. The occasion which drew me there was Miuccia Prada’s premiere of two new movies in her Miu Miu Women’s Tales series, the fifth and sixth movies she’s commissioned—with a free brief—to encourage the work of women film directors. The overt link between the pieces is that all the costumes are from Miu Miu collections, but the real communality lies in the subtle sidelights shone on the roles clothes play in women’s lives. “The real subject,” she said, with a subversive glint in her eye, “Is vanity. What it is for us. That’s interesting, no?”
The Door, by the L.A. director Ava DuVernay, is a lyrical blues piece in which a jilted Gabrielle Union is visited by women friends who insist on coaxing her to eat, get dressed, go out, and start living again (and with the curative availability of the entire Miu Miu spring collection in her wardrobe—who wouldn’t?). Le Donne della Vucciria, by the Palestinian director Hiam Abbass, shot in Palermo, opens with a more fashion-ambivalent image: a couple of marionette-makers dressing wooden puppets in miniature versions of the fall Miu Miu collection. The camera pans into the market square outside where adult women, clad in the same clothes, start clapping and dancing as a troupe of musicians arrive.
But trust Mrs. Prada not to be content with just putting together her own mini Miu Miu movie studio to give women directors’ a leg up in their career visibility. An entourage—Carey Mulligan, Freida Pinto, Michelle Dockery, Gabrielle Union—posed on the red carpet, wearing Miu Miu, but they also came at Prada’s invitation to share their brain-power, humor, and experiences. There were panel discussions with and about women in the film industry and a surprise dinner laid on (without paparazzi) at the Prada Foundation’s Ca’Corner della Regina palazzo on the Grand Canal. The Venice Biennale happens to dovetail with the film festival, and Miuccia Prada’s inquisitive mind—and power as a patron—naturally crosses both domains. Guests including Marina Abramović, Bruce Weber, Harvey Weinstein, and Franca Sozzani enjoyed a private view of the foundation’s new exhibition, “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013.” It’s a re-creation of a sixties installation-art show, which might shake purists to the core, but provocation, increasingly, seems to be Mrs. Prada’s pleasure. These days, like a twenty-first-century salon hostess, Miuccia Prada’s getting a kick out of stirring up social cocktails, putting interesting people together who’ll talk, think, break taboos, speak up, and be frank.
I strongly suspect that what we see happening on the Miu Miu today, and all the women’s ideas she’s championing, can only be the very tip of the plans she’s musing about behind the scenes. What will come out of it? “ I don’t know,” the designer shrugged with a huge smile. “It is an experiment!” And with that, she was off at a trot toward Milan. The spring collection for Prada, after all, is due to be on the runway in two weeks’ time.
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