In a city where the majority of cultural activity now appears to be delivered by luxury brands—from the Fondation Cartier to Dior’s sponsorship of the Louvre and the foyer of the Grand Palais (named, and not without controversy, for Gabrielle Chanel)—it’s only right that one of the big hits of Paris’s current art-filled week comes courtesy of a new name on the sponsorship circuit.
Welcome Miu Miu, the Italian fashion brand so-called after Miuccia Prada’s own family nickname, and which functions very much under the designer’s creative control. The house is sponsoring Art Basel Paris’s public programme, and staging its own five-day exhibition, “Tales & Tellers.”
Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, courtesy Miu Miu and t-space studio.
The show takes place at the Palais d’Iéna in the city’s 16th arrondisement—a grandiose experiment in concrete designed by Auguste Perrot in 1939. For several years, it has been the location for Miu Miu’s twice-yearly runway shows. But this week, its second floor (a monumental 60-meter-long space, its wood-lined ceiling held up by lines of sleek pillars) is filled with screens of many sizes, from iPhone, to tablet, to big and bold.
Out of these, actors seemed to have stepped, dressed in the same Miu Miu outfits they wear in the films being shown upon them. A woman in a tight brocade dress sings an Arab wedding song, as a girl skateboards past in a pale yellow sleeveless sweater with jewel-encrusted shoulders. A grey-haired lady sits quietly sewing. In a corner, a non-binary individual changes silently from a navy ruffled gown into a red tracksuit, after removing a blonde layered wig. A young woman does yoga and martial arts in soft grey shorts.
Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, courtesy Miu Miu and t-space studio.
Sometimes all 30 or so actors come together, and file into the semi-circular lecture theatre where they bang the wooden surfaces until a delicate sound of singing emerges from their collective voices. (Female power, it implies, can be both scary and sweet.) It is all rather fabulous and unexpected and—thanks to an equally gorgeous budget and the sort of standards about which the fashion world is most fastidious—delivered to perfection.
“I’m interested in copies, so it’s surreal in a way that suits me,” says Cécile B. Evans, an artist who was commissioned to create a moving image work for Miu Miu’s Fall/Winter show in 2024, as her character, RECEPTION, appears both on a screen and then in the exhibition space. Evans’s work is about memory, the validity and value of those in our heads and in our digital imprints. “I like to relinquish control, it’s useful exercise,” says Evans. “Audiences are so smart now. This represents the world that we live in.”
Miu Miu Tales and Tellers, courtesy Miu Miu and t-space studio.
Indeed, ‘Tales & Tellers’, is a play of layers, both real and imagined, of questions, not answers. If a real actor is in the room, is the screen actor reduced to simulacrum, or the other way round? Exactly which way is this mirror working? And who is in control, the teller of the tale?
Miu Miu’s film project Women’s Tales started in 2011 with a short directed by Zoe Cassavetes called The Powder Room, which examined the highs and lows of female vanity. Since then, another 27 have been made by directors including heroic names like Agnès Varda and Ava DuVernay, as well as the Malaysian Tan Chui Mui, the Saudi Haifaa al-Mansour and Lila Avilés from Mexico. (Remember: luxury lives everywhere.)
Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, courtesy Miu Miu and t-space studio.
The conditions are that the subjects and issues are female, and the fashions are Miu Miu. With plenty of ribbed knitwear, straight pants and pleated skirts in the Miu pattern book, this is not as strange as it sounds, though in Laura Citarella’s Argentine-set fashion-heist caper, the chief inspector has so many fabulous pairs of glasses, that they alone are grounds for theft. (Only Miranda July dares to break the brief. In Somebody, made in 2014, the policeman’s real clothing rather demonstrates the origin story of many preferred Miu Miu shapes. Miuccia likes a uniform.)
Since 2022, the brand has also commissioned seven artists’ interventions created for the runway. The latest was by Goshka Macuga, the Polish artist who lives in London. She made an installation (for the Spring/ Summer 2025 collection, shown earlier this month) where hundreds of copies of a newspaper, The Truthless Times, slowly circled around a rack suspended over the heads of the hundreds of influencers and celebrities, who now make up the fashion show audience.
Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, courtesy Miu Miu and t-space studio.
“Fashion is about news and the promotion of ideas,” says Macuga. “But news and ideas are now promoted in an emotional way through social media and I was interested in the counterbalance of that, of traditional journalism. I grew up in a socialist country, where I always had to investigate for truth, to get to the essence of things.”
This line of enquiry apparently got to Prada herself, who studied politics not fashion and was drawn in her youth to socialist views. “She loved the idea of the newspaper, and how beneath the banal headlines are individual articles that dig deeper into ideas,” says Macuga. Indeed, thanks to chunky QR codes beneath the Truthless Times story titles (and much work by MACBA Museum of Contemporary Art director Elvira Dyangani Ose, in their compilation) are links to various texts and organisations. They include an essay on Endcore (a repost to Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man) by Shumon Basar, and a group concerned with the future of farming.
Macuga is interested in giving us hyperlinks not messages, suggesting it is our duty as intelligent beings to look beyond the instant hit of the one-line scream out, or the dodgy reality of the single staged image. So it is with fashion. Like it or not, clothing choices also equal instant messaging. But as ‘Tales and Tellers’ seeks to reveal, and I’m sure Miuccia Prada would like to think, much more lies beneath.
‘Tales and Tellers’ is at the Palais d’Iéna, 75016 Paris, until October 20.