It's not such a clear vision

A year ago, Miuccia Prada finished Paris Fashion Week as the most acclaimed designer in the profession, but this season she ended up looking a little confused.

Not to say that the collection she showed on Tuesday didn't have some very pretty pieces with an avant-garde edge, just that they all looked pretty similar to several recent Miu Miu ideas. That is, lots of bras, sports bras, underwear and panties peeking through multiple half-open dresses and blouses.

The Italian designer also showed modern dirndl patent leather knee-length dresses and flared skirts, combined with three metallic belts; and combined with knee-high socks and a white T-shirt with the characteristic logo. A dozen more male and female models in this mixed show. The blouses inevitably remained open at the back and the dresses were completed with many rhinestones.

He mixed elements of active sports, from ankle-length hooded anoraks and nylon coaches jackets to a series of piping sports jackets that looked familiar to those of us who've seen recent Willy Chavarría shows. Ahem.

Miuccia also employed her old tactic of including cool, often slightly androgynous celebrities in her cast: Alexa Chung, Eliot Sumner, Hilary Swank and Willem Dafoe, the latter two with wry smiles.

But overall, the show didn't have much impact and followed a Prada show in Milan, which lacked a really clear focus.

Signora Prada has been putting up art installations at Miu Miu shows for some time. This season, it was 'Salt Looks Like Sugar' by Goshka Macuga, a Polish artist based in London. Composed of two giant screens that project a light story about two investigative journalists, called Logos and Pathos, who have a fight because one of them is having an affair. They both work for a newspaper called 'The Truthless Times', owned by the Queer Labor Party. Copies were left at each seat. None of them had proper stories, just headlines and introductions. Two typical: researchers report readers reading or hot air releasing false instincts.

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Above the heads of the audience: copies of the newspaper circulated along a winding track. It's quite ironic, given the number of Generation Z and influence peddlers in the front row, few of whom you imagine have bought a newspaper in the final four weeks of the international runway season.

A note on each seat warned: “In the context of the post-truth era, where the boundaries between reality and fiction are increasingly blurred, understanding who controls the narrative related to events becomes even more critical.”

A fair point. But to suggest that newspapers – as this installation effectively does – are somehow a threat to veracity is ultimately misleading. As any serious intellectual should know – which Miuccia surely is – the biggest threat is unbridled Big Tech. Unlike newspapers that are forced to stick pretty close to the truth thanks to defamation laws, there are no real restrictions on social media platforms like X, TikTok or Meta. And until the day these platforms are no longer required to follow the same rules as the old media, the new media will remain the far greater threat to honesty in public discourse.

Too bad Miu Miu didn't spend a bit of money explaining that.