HIGHLIGHTS
Purpose and Values
A Parisian racecourse in high summer: a panorama of fashionable display as much as sporting prowess, the steeplechase circuit a symbol of locomotion, hurtling onwards - a metaphor for fashion itself.
Miu Miu returns to the Bois de Boulogne’s Hippodrome d’Auteuil, the locale of the Miu Miu Croisière 2020 show, as a context for the Croisière 2020 campaign, photographed by Juergen Teller with creative direction by Katie Grand. Using the concourse of the Hippodrome as a striking scenography, with its vistas stretching to the Parisian skyline - interrupted by racehorses going through all the manoeuvres of the manège - these images are innately grounded in that locality. They are expressive of both its visual language and rich inherent meanings.
The eternal allure of the racecourse, of the universe of the equestrian, were the inspiration behind the Miu Miu Croisière 2020 collection, imbued with all the antecedents of glamour knotted up with race-courses. They were - and remain - arenas of café society, of stylistic exchange. Juergen Teller’s impromptu images draw on that inexorable well of cultural iconography, emphasising the notion of the racecourse as a crux of different spheres of sports and style. Referent to the Jockey Club de Paris, a storied male-only establishment that was a mark of distinction for the men of le tout Paris in the past century, this is Miu Miu’s own Jockey Club - an inverted Jockey Club, for women only, the latest iteration and evolution of the feminine sphere of the Miu Miu Club.
Accordingly, the club of women in these images are all-important: youthful, rebellious, free. They include Adut Akech, Abby Champion, Tang He, Aliet Sarah and Sarah Snyder, who all featured in the Miu Miu Croisière 2020 runway show, while making her debut for Miu Miu is Lila Moss.
Femininity and racecourses tie together: the sartorial codes and signifiers of the tradition of Ladies’ Day in English racing, where fashion is flaunted and spectators become the spectacle that often eclipse the event at hand, is a natural inspiration. Born from this idiosyncratic idea of the observation of the observation of the sport - rather than the sportspeople, or their exertions - these images are the main event. This Miu Miu campaign revels in fashion: lush colour, emphatic silhouettes, the joy of dressing up, all silhouetted against the green of the steeple turf. Here, the codes of dress ascribed to those events are challenged, overthrown, exaggerated and rewritten - notions of the conservative or bourgeoise, long associated with the dress of racing attendees, come undone, boldly expressive of a boundless joie de vivre.