Miu Miu is well versed in working its magic in more ways than one. The fashion house has collaborated with female artists on runways and in its offbeat jewellery collections, campaigns and literary ventures.

It’s become a forum for creative conversations exploring ever-transforming ideas of femininity. In 2011, Miu Miu debuted Women’s Tales, an ongoing anthology series that supports distinctive female filmmakers to present their own view of vanity and the plurality of femininity through a cutting-edge lens.

Continuing this dialogue by restructuring its biannual shows, beginning in 2022, Miu Miu aims to spotlight not only Miuccia Prada’s iconoclastic clothes, but also the work of prominent female artists. Through a stream of installations and motion-image projects commissioned to accompany its shows, the house aims to foster a deeper understanding of womanhood. This has been the enduring inspiration for all Miu Miu enterprises since its establishment in 1992 – an unwavering and reverential love for the lives of women and their experiences, histories and tales.

Thirty-two years on, and coinciding with the announcement of Miu Miu’s role as Public Program Official Partner for Art Basel Paris 2024, the fashion house will present a monumental exhibition in the French capital from October 16-20. Conceived by Polish artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Barcelona-based art curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, the immersive retrospective, Tales and Tellers, journeys through Miu Miu’s archive to toast womanhood.

Taking shape at the modernist Palais d’Iéna, the exhibition will bring femininity into focus. Featured artists – the “tellers” – will offer unique perceptions of the female experience as they bear witness to the world swirling around them.

Showcasing all 27 episodes of Miu Miu Women’s Tales – each directed by notable names such as Chloë Sevigny, Agnès Varda, Miranda July, Mati Diop, Ava DuVernay and Chui Mui Tan, to name a few – the house ties together a multiverse of narratives spanning filmmaking, art and fashion.

These will be exhibited alongside video pieces taken from the artistic interventions seen at Miu Miu’s crowd-pulling runway shows, which are also held at Palais d’Iéna, marking a full-circle moment for the house. This reciprocity between artists and the maison explores a multiplicity of ideas, often centring around themes of technology, futurism and surrealism. The first artistic exchange of this kind unfurled during the SS22 season with works by Moroccan digital artist Meriem Bennani that starred her own mother. Bennani blurred the lines between virtual and real by mixing fantasy sequences with snippets of faux front-row audience reactions displayed on binocular-shaped screens.

This was followed by an AW22 film of otherworldly Claymation creatures like a kleptomaniac grouse and a spindly, cadaverous hand that mimicked the jewellery created for the house by Swedish artist duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg. Their works were not only worn on the runway but also plastered on the sling chairs laid out for the audience. Chinese artist Shuang Li was the brains behind the subaquatic digital renderings confronting the impossibility of communication in the age of hyper-language seen at the SS23 show.

For AW23, South Korean choreographer and performance artist Geumhyung Jeong explored the relationship between her body and clothing using the fabric itself as the protagonist of the performance. Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria’s landscape of technological ruins erected for SS24 imagined a court jester and a royal guard who couldn’t agree whether life is a tragedy or comedy, while American-Belgian artist Cécile B. Evans’s AW24 commission starred French actress Guslagie Malanda as Reception, one of the last human translators on Earth amid a storage crisis that has erased digital memories.

Extracting select characters from the house’s flush of fashion stories, the hero, or anti-hero, will reenact the narrative with live performances before video projections of the original film or artistic compositions from which they were born. These characters will physically reenact fragmented adaptations of the primary narrative, serving as guardians of their memories.

These multidimensional performances will coincide with a series of conversations led by the directors of Women’s Tales and the visionary contributors who have created video work for the house’s catwalk shows. The featured talents will speak about their origins, lives and histories, articulating the motivations and ideas behind the tales they are telling.

Created by women, for women, Tales and Tellers is a remarkable testament to Miu Miu’s enduring commitment to uplifting and celebrating the plurality of what it is to be female. And it does so beautifully.

‘Tales and Tellers’ is part of Art Basel Paris’s Public Program and will be staged at the Palais d’Iéna, Paris. The project is open to the public from 16-20 October 2024.

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