Miuccia Prada - Designer, Co-Creative Director of Prada & Creative Director of Miu Miu

[softgrey]

Miuccia: Reality TV’s Latest Fan
Prada unveils art film with “Bachelor”-type antics

Monday, March 29, 2004

Miuccia Prada doesn’t seem like the sort of gal who wastes away evenings on the couch with a beer and a bag of chips, taking in her evening dose of “The Bachelor.”   But wrapped up in a lovely, artistic package, the concept of reality TV has the Italian designer captivated.   Friday in Milan, the Fondazione Prada unveiled a “fake” reality TV program in their giant exhibit space in Via Fogazzaro, the latest work of art by Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli.  Vezzoli had the genius idea of staging and filming a reality TV show that takes a “dating game” format, except that the contestants are famous actresses (who know that the whole show is a gag) while the audience and the suitors (unsuspecting Italian males with throbbing libidos) have no clue their antics will end up in a film at Fondazione Prada.  Vezzoli rounded up aging, iconic screen stars Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Marianne Faithfull, Antonella Lualdi and Terry Schiavo, to play along in his sociological experiment.  Filmed in Rome last month with Miuccia looking on backstage, the one-hour film provides a compelling and hilarious examination of sexual roles, gay prejudice and long-outdated seduction techniques.  It’s also ingeniously laced with every tacky stereotype found on Italian TV today:  an enormously breasted blond TV presenter in a formal gown and giant jewelry, a nearly naked ensemble of talentless dancers providing mid show entertainment, horrible screen designs, and a raging, narrow-minded audience that reflects Italy’s widespread provinciality.  
J.J. MARTIN

 

[tott]

WOW, this I gotta see! Sounds like a hoot! And so true... Thank you so much for the tip!

I really should start following what's happening around me, at least I understand Italian fairly well even if I freeze when I'm expected to talk...

Date: 26 March - 16 May 2004

Venue: Fondazione Prada

Address: via Fogazzaro 36, Milan

Opening Times: Tuesday-Sunday, 10 am-8 pm; closed Monday

Admission: free

http://www.fondazioneprada.org

 

[softgrey]

Originally posted by tott@Mar 29th, 2004 - 4:40 pm
WOW, this I gotta see! Sounds like a hoot! And so true... Thank you so much for the tip!

I really should start following what's happening around me, at least I understand Italian fairly well even if I freeze when I'm expected to talk...

Date: 26 March - 16 May 2004

Venue: Fondazione Prada

Address: via Fogazzaro 36, Milan

Opening Times: Tuesday-Sunday, 10 am-8 pm; closed Monday

Admission: free

http://www.fondazioneprada.org

okay tott... you are officially our milan correspondent...please check this out and report back...it definitely sounds amusing...can't wait for your review!

 

[tott]

Originally posted by softgrey@Mar 29th, 2004 - 10:48 pm
okay tott... you are officially our milan correspondent...please check this out and report back...it definitely sounds amusing...can't wait for your review!

I am so going!



Expect a full coverage soon!

 

[Lena]

It’s also ingeniously laced with every tacky stereotype found on Italian TV today: an enormously breasted blond TV presenter in a formal gown and giant jewelry, a nearly naked ensemble of talentless dancers providing mid show entertainment, horrible screen designs, and a raging, narrow-minded audience that reflects Italy’s widespread provinciality.

thats so real, Italian tv is definetly the worst kitch ever
the project must be quite entertaining
thanks for bringing this in softgrey

tott, i'm so waiting for your take on this

 

[tott]

Well, I've seen it now and don't quite know what to say... I'm going to see it again with a friend, I went by myself yesterday.

The film was inspired by Pasolini's film "Comizi d'amore", in which he documented peoples views on life, sex, relationships.

The dating show, "Comizi di non amore", was actually produced by a professional production company; it really is like every tacky Italian TV show. No irony or ingenuity here, folks. Though I wish it wasn't like this in reality.

But... Since it is "art" you do sharpen your senses and discover new lows of the format.

For people outside of Italy, it certainly could be amusing...

Supposedly, only the artist and the contestants knew this wasn't a real show. The suitors were chosen by the artist to match/mismatch the contestants. There were a few twists, for instance; one of the suitors was a transvestite and one was a lesbian. Other than that, it really was a "real" show being taped.

After each segment, members of the audience were invited to share their predictable thoughts on what just occured. The purpose here was to document a piece of reality, just like Pasolini did 40 years ago.

All in all, I found it boring and predictable. If I change my mind, I'll let you know.

 

[softgrey]

thanks for the feedback tott....i've seen other works sponsored by prada which left me cold...art can be so subjective...sounds like a good diversion for an afternoon though...

 

[Lena]

thanks tott, sad it was not too exciting for you

 

[Lena]

here a NYT article on Miucia and her recent collaboration with the legendary critic and curator Germano Celant for Fondazione Prada

Germano and sweet Miucia

In Prada's headquarters, on Via Bergamo in Milan, employees get to enjoy the movable parts of Pino Pascali's fur-covered sculpture, "Solitario." The wall hanging is by Michael Heizer.

Marianne Faithfull, one of the guest stars (film by Francesco Vezzoli at Fondazioane Prada Milano - as already discussed ) In the course of the film, modern attitudes about homosexuality, love, fidelity and the role of television are explored.

 

[Lena]

Vezzoli's film, above, was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 documentary, "Love Meetings," in which he questioned Italians from all walks of life about love and sex.

The artist Francesco Vezzoli, surrounded by characters in his film, just part of the project he calls the Trilogy of Death.

"Non-Love Meetings," Franseco Vezzoli's film, which was shown last month at the Fondazione Prada, is a dating-game reality show. The audience and the bachelors, who are auditioning to be contestants, believe the show is real, while guest stars like Jeanne Moreau, are in on the ruse.


photos from NYT magazine

 

[softgrey]

thx 4 the pics lena

 

[Spacemiu]

I lvoe this diea, evry intretsing

 

[Atelier]

Originally posted by Lena@Apr 10th, 2004 - 5:00 am

What a beautiful picture.

I can't wait to see this. I'm totally ready for another Joe Schmo-type parody about reality tv and this one seems to stylishly fit the bill.

 

[tott]

The thing is, to me, that this isn't really a parody. It's slightly excaggerated, but I'm actually living with these über-tacky Italian shows...

If I was un-touched by Italian TV, it would be a parody and I'd probably be totally fascinated and amused!

Some parts of the film were fun, like watching Cathrine Deneuve's reaction when one of her suitors "serenaded" her with an explicit song... And the end was fun as well.

 

[Atelier]

Originally posted by tott@Apr 10th, 2004 - 6:59 pm
If I was un-touched by Italian TV, it would be a parody and I'd probably be totally fascinated and amused!

This is precisely why I want to watch it, tott. I'm inundated with American versions so to watch something other than that is a welcomed treat, particularly one that pokes fun at the genre.

 

[monsieur_a]

can't believe no one post pictures of miuccia.. she is one of best dressed woman, i reckon.



(style.com)

 

[monsieur_a]

(all from style.com)

 

[monsieur_a]

(also style.com)

 

[monsieur_a]

(style.com)

 

[MissMagAddict]

image source | fashiongonerogue

source | wmagazine

Smart Sex

Miuccia Prada, perhaps fashion’s most mysterious designer, opens up about her high-chic complexity, while Kate Moss shows off the designer’s fall collection, one of her finest yet.

By Bridget Foley
Photographs by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott
Styled by Alex White
September 2009

The show ends. Wrapping up the finale, the models disappear backstage, one after another, to thunderous applause followed by a few seconds of dramatic-tension delay. Will she or won’t she? The audience starts to play the familiar mental game, even though most savvy fashion vets know perfectly well she will. And presto! Miuccia Prada pokes her head out from behind a set wall, smiles knowingly and, in a flash, disappears. The applause swells to a brief crescendo before the crowd, duly satiated, rushes either backstage or out the door.

Prada’s split-second, twice-annual acknowledgment of the fashion flock’s acknowledgment of her genius has become as much an industry standard as shipping fall in July, and, some would say, is plenty calculated.

One of the most famous, most talked about, most respected designers working today, she swathes herself in an aura of mystery unusual in this celeb-obsessed, fashion-obsessed, blogging, tweeting, no-secrets world.

By doing so, Prada keeps even the cynical insider set awed by her rara avis credentials. An influential powerhouse for the better part of 20 years (she introduced ready-to-wear to the family luggage business in 1988), she retains that status on the strength of designs that brilliantly straddle the divide between cerebral and commercial. That approach has garnered her a reputation as fashion’s predominant intellectual artiste—or at least its predominant intellectual artiste with a major business—and one of the most envied and most pressured perches in the industry.

Prada’s most recent collection, for fall, highlighted here on Kate Moss, offers a near perfect fusion of the components fueling the designer’s stardom. Its initial inspiration was countrified, hence the thick, rough-hewn fabrics and the show’s anchor, thigh-high fishermen’s waders, inspired by a photo that found its way into her office, as such inspirational material does all across fashion, in the weeks preceding collections time.

“A girl with this huge boot but a twist on the idea of the high boot,” Prada says. This endless strapped-on utility galosh provided an editorial springboard for very glamorous, very real clothes—fabulous coats and suits, ladies!—with a manageable Forties feeling that stood out in a Milan season elsewhere, for some inexplicable reason, big on glitzed-out retro club wear.

Commercial? Absolutely, in that some-women-still-spend-thousands-a-pop kind of way. Yet Prada has stayed at the pinnacle of fashion by allowing high chic to frolic with perversity while she herself seems to stay, if not oblivious, then above it all. Thus perfect, even sensible, tailoring shared the runway with shorts made of hair, and those waders splashed over from tools of a trade to fetish boot du jour. Although one can certainly identify sexual shenanigans in Prada’s work over the years, the obviousness here is a relatively new arrival, one mirrored in her own manner of dressing, which recently evolved from a full-skirted, Italian mama vibe (so genuine, the uninformed would likely have assumed Prada was anything but a fashion designer) to something more overtly alluring, if in a wacky, left-field way: On an afternoon in June she greets a visitor to her Milan headquarters working one of her spring collection’s lean numbers, the fabric light-toned and crinkled, with an add-on silvery gray apron (a key editorial item in her spring lineup) arranged to cover one hip, and elegant, dangling antique black pearl earrings contrasting a knitted grunge cap, a look that darned few middle-aged women not named Edie Beale would even dream of trying to pull off.

She is just back from the Venice Biennale, where, through Fondazione Prada, which supports contemporary artists, she hosted a party for John Wesley and punctuated the end of a spectacular and busy year, creatively speaking. Two stellar fall collections bracketed a spring effort that got a shot of intrigue at retail when Prada engaged four top fashion editors, including W’s Alex White (who styled Moss for this shoot), to redesign flagship stores in New York, London, Milan and Paris around the collection. Meanwhile, the April opening in Seoul, South Korea, of her firm’s Transformer space—the vast temporary steel structure designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Office of Metropolitan Architecture to change shape to accommodate various art installations (the first was Prada’s own “Waist Down,” still flying around the world, on and off, for five years)—turned into a PR coup in an essential emerging market. Conversely, with its polished intimacy, Prada’s June resort show in New York raised the bar for presenting that particularly difficult season.

“Usually my ideas come from what I don’t want to do, or what I find is old. I was really fed up of couture,” Prada says regarding fall, her excellent English suffering little from the occasional syntax snafu. One of the few designers who can change her message 180 degrees from one season to the next without relinquishing a bit of her identity, Prada opted for precision structure for fall after spring’s rumpled-crumpled look.

The conceit was country yet hardly straightforward. Rather, since “you can’t live, apparently, without glamour,” Prada sought “a kind of an impossible combination…. Let’s put in the opposite of the glamour, which is the country.” Along the way she became obsessed with the idea of a perfect red suit and with leather, which she slashed like a knife-wielding predator because she felt she had insufficiently developed peekaboo skins in the previous season at Miu Miu. “It was very womanly, yes,” she notes. “Feminine, powerful.” Yet a collection she thought, “because of the heavy fabrics, everyone would hate.”