Since 2011, Miuccia Prada, the patron saint of smart, messy women everywhere, has been using her Miu Miu line as a platform to commission short films by female filmmakers from around the world, including Janicza Bravo, Mati Diop and Haifaa al-Mansour. For Mrs. Prada, the films, which sometimes air during her fashion shows, serve as a backdrop to her clothes, which have always explored the chaotic lives of mothers, sisters, rebels, poets and punks without ever trying to reconcile their contradictions. That has made Miu Miu the darling of the fashion industry, the rare fashion brand to experience explosive growth at a time when sales in general are slowing.
Last year, during Art Basel Paris, Mrs. Prada decided it was time to bring all the films together, and she enlisted the Polish artist Goshka Macuga to help. The result was an immersive performance piece of sorts that involved a cast of 35 characters from the films, brought to life by 105 different actors. It was such an unexpected hit, with 11,000 people visiting the Paris show during its five-day run, that she and Ms. Macuga decided to recreate it this weekend for Frieze New York.
The new show, entitled “Tales & Tellers,” is being staged in the Terminal Warehouse, the cavernous late-19th-century building on the Far West Side of Manhattan, latterly home to the Tunnel nightclub. And it is an altogether darker take on the state of women than the Paris event was. (Still, wardrobe by Miu Miu.)
“We’re looking at the concept of inside and outside, the idea of individuals coming together in a group,” the artist Goshka Macuga said.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The show takes place in the Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Mrs. Prada and Ms. Macuga Zoomed in to explain. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
There hasn’t been a Miu Miu show in New York in decades, but now there is. Sort of. Why this?
MIUCCIA PRADA The clothes are an excuse to have the support of the company to create these projects where women are talking about themselves, which is very important. In my work, I have always embraced the complexity of women, the complexity of our lives, how we can succeed in developing our abilities. So it’s fundamental to know what women do, what they think, in different contexts.
GOSHKA MACUGA All these different stories represent different social problems for women in different countries. Like, for example, the film which I feel very close to, “Nightwalk” by Małgorzata Szumowska, was filmed in Poland at a time when gender issues were really repressed by our government. It was talking about this idea of liberation within a context that was not sympathetic to difference.
