Editor’s Note: We’re kickstarting the Fall 2024 menswear season by adding two Miu Miu ready-to-wear collections (Spring and Fall 1999) to the Vogue Runway archive. These were the first two shows with menswear from Miu Miu, a line that was active for ten years (1998-2008) and around which a nostalgic cult has developed. It is impossible to relive the past, but documenting it is another story…. To enjoy.
Miu Miu’s Fall 1999 Coed Collection, reported the New York Times‘s Amy Spindler, was inspired by “a passage from a Tim Burton short story about Stick Boy and Match Girl, the gist of which is that they both think the other is hot. “I find young boys so charming,” Miuccia Prada told the critic. “I love the way young people are different and so kind to each other.” Besides being a nice sentiment, it was also a good thing; as the newspaper’s Lynn Hirschberg would report later that year in a story titled “Desperate to Seem 16”: “the teenage children of the baby boom generation happen to be the largest teen audience in history.” That meant a lot of attention was paid to these 2.0 Youthquakers and to preying on young people, both at the box office (the writer suggested Romeo + Juliet started the trend of teen drama in entertainment) and on the retail floor.
In this collection, Ms. Prada seemed to have made the leap of the game sticks matching; the appearance of the men and women was more coordinated than the previous season. Once again the emphasis was on the outdoors, which was reflected in the palette, the hiking boots and the use of ‘natural’ materials such as suede and sheepskin. At the same time, some shoes had rubber soles and other holographic patterns. The ad campaign found the models in a futuristic box through which a nighttime cityscape could be spied upon. It looked like they were floating in space as they sat on the windows and looked at the world through glass – now that I think about it, that’s pretty much how we use our phones 25 years later.
