As a project, the film series Miu Miu Women’s Tales is very much like Miu Miu clothes, and like Miuccia Prada herself: multifaceted, many-layered, often paradoxical. It’s both complex and simple – free rein given to female filmmakers to make short movies, the only proviso being that they be by women and about women, and that the women wear Miu Miu clothes. Meaning the interpretations of the brief are wild, confrontational and dynamic.
Begun in 2011, the series has unfolded and expanded across 13 years since 2021 with an adjacent series of artistic interventions that run as part of Miu Miu fashion shows, created again by female artists and generally comprising film. As Miuccia Prada herself says: “With the Tales we created a platform for talented directors: through their gaze we have opened a conversation on the world of femininity and vanity and what it means today. A conversation with women about women.”
That conversation just became much, much bigger. Leading the public programme of Art Basel Paris, a new project has been unveiled that grapples with the multidimensional nature of Women’s Tales, and the discussions at the heart of them and of Miu Miu and Miuccia Prada’s work. It’s also a celebration of Miu Miu Women’s Tales as a significant and meaningful body of work – directors have included Janicza Bravo, Ava DuVernay, Miranda July, Lynn Ramsay, and the late Agnès Varda, as well as directorial turns by Chloë Sevigny and Dakota Fanning. This re-imagining has also been retitled – Tales & Tellers.
It’s a celebration that is simultaneously retrospective and starkly innovative, therefore compelling: 35 characters have been ‘extracted’ from the Miu Miu Women’s Tales films and artistic interventions, to be re-enacted by performers in the hypostyle of the Palais d’Iéna, where Miu Miu hosts its biannual fashion shows. Each of them sports a device, a screen – some subtly, and some frankly and humorously obnoxious – to showcase the film from which the character is taken. They’re secreted in backpacks, in viewfinders, form mirrors or act like true cinematic backdrops.
The entirety of this artwork (or event, or installation, or maybe ‘happening’, to borrow that 60s parlance that kind of feels appropriate here) which unspools between 16 and 20 October 2024, was conceived by the Poland-born, London-based artist Goshka Macuga, who also collaborated on the Spring/Summer 2025 Miu Miu show, and convened by the curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Ose described Macuga’s practice as “uniquely generous,” while Macuga said her aim was to “bring characters to life, and blend them into reality.” Ose’s choice term of the event as a “project of projects” is apt, given that it is an aggregate piece, an original piece formed from others’ original work. And that connects with Macuga’s body of work, which often involves re-readings of existing materials or documents to find new narratives, different tales.
In true Miu Miu fashion, Tales & Tellers is both easy and fiendishly difficult to describe. Essentially, it’s 35 individual live performances, each based on a film’s character chosen by Macuga, in collaboration with the creators – they are the tellers, of their tales. Some are main characters, some more peripheral and ambiguous. In total, a team of over 100 actors perform these roles in shifts across the days, choreographed by theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich. Their performances are both solipsistic – the first, ‘Audrey’, taken from the debut Women’s Tale, has a performer staring at herself in a digital ‘mirror’ as she grooms herself, apparently unaware of observers – but also collective. When ‘Carmen’ (from Chloë Sevigny’s 2017 film) performs stand-up, the other characters convene to watch, laugh, and applaud. The photographer ‘Brigitte’ – Lacombe, from Lynne Ramsay’s 2019 tale – pulls in other actors to take their pictures. In a meta touch, Lacombe herself was present at the opening – alongside her doppelgänger (she insisted on wearing a brightly-coloured beanie hat to differentiate between the two). And when you view the entirety of the hypostyle, the panorama of performances all interact.
As that suggests, there were some unexpected intersections too: firstly, the number of people, moving around the space dressed in Miu Miu – faces unknown, some known (the costume designer Catherine Martin in a Kermit-green wool suit; Chloë Sevigny in a black coat and ‘film star’ sunglasses; Miuccia Prada herself at the vernissage in a Heinz-y tomato gabardine coat) lead to a glorious confusion between performer and audience, weighted by the planned interactions. As ‘Rachelle’ (from That One Day, 2016, by Crystal Moselle) skateboarded through the space, cutting through the narratives of a half-dozen other performers, one observer simply commented to me: “This is nuts.” On the opening day, it was indeed – “the first time in real life, real bodies, in front of real people,” Macuga said, gleefully. As she spoke, a performer in a sheer tulle Miu Miu skirt floated past her, and for a minute just looked like a wayward guest.
The clothes the characters wear becomes part of their tales, undoubtedly – representative of specific seasons, they are nevertheless chosen for specific function, becoming cinematic costumes rather than fashion items. Which of course intersects with traditional views of fashion as a feminine sphere, often to its denigration. Here, however, within a female universe, fashion is another tool to convey meaning, to tell a tale. As Macuga herself told me, “Miu Miu’s archive is like a living entity in itself, with pieces from different historical periods and collections, drawing associations to different eras. It’s as if each garment carries its own story, adding another layer to the overall narrative.”
Tales & Tellers is an extraordinary experience – and in contrast to our ceaseless consumption of reality in the digital age, it’s one that you have to be present, in the flesh, to really ‘get’.
Tales & Tellers is conceived by artist Goshka Macuga and convened by curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, and staged at the Palais d’Iéna, Paris from 16-20 October 2024 as part of Art Basel Paris, Public Program Official partner.