Latest news with #MiucciaPrada
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A New Super-Group of Creative Talent
For two days in April, during the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan, the fashion brand Miu Miu hosted a book club. It was quite an undertaking, one that involved only a small amount of actual reading. Produced to the exacting taste of Miuccia Prada, the event, a cultural experience of sorts to promote the arts, involved the creation of a 96-page branding guide, which included a color palette of six shades of orange, blue and ocher, as well as a custom logotype and its application across posters, banners, digital ads, menus, coasters, pencils, notebooks and more. Guests sat on tasseled couches, lit by table lamps. The dress code was Miu Miu, of course. Executed with the help of two external agencies — 2x4, the New York design firm founded by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout in 1994, and Kennedy, the London experiential design agency founded by Jan Kennedy in 2000 — the second annual Miu Miu Literary Club attracted more than 2,000 attendees, among them the International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree. Both 2x4 and Kennedy have collaborated on all manner of 'activations,' as events like this are known in marketing speak, but after decades of operating independently, the firms are now under the same ownership, having recently sold majority stakes to a rapidly growing entity called the Independents. In fact, they are two of 13 such small companies to be gobbled up in the last two years, joining a total of 19 agencies worldwide. A Unique Collective The Independents was founded in 2017 when Isabelle and Olivier Chouvet and a third partner, Alexandre Monteux, merged K2, their Shanghai event and production company, with Karla Otto, a veteran fashion and luxury public relations firm. Together, their clients included Chanel, Cartier, Celine, Moncler, Valentino and Nike. The Independents' original funding came from the private equity firm Cathay Capital, which was bought out in 2023 with a new round of $580 million funding led by a bank pool, TowerBrook Capital Partners, and Banijay, a strategic long-term investor that has the opportunity to increase its investment in 2026. Mr. and Ms. Chouvet remain majority investors. Mr. and Ms. Chouvet, both French, made their mark in Asia with a string of entrepreneurial ventures, including the Chinese flash sale site which Mr. Chouvet and his partners sold to Alibaba in 2015. The couple set up K2 in 2002. Its first project was the introduction of Chanel's J12 watch in Japan. By 2017, Ms. Chouvet had developed a network that made her firm the go-to for luxury brands looking to do world-class activations — the public relations, branding, events, production and social media — in Japan, China and Korea. 'I wanted to do what I did in Asia worldwide,' Ms. Chouvet said of founding the Independents. 'I only had the experience and capabilities in Asia, so I immediately looked for a partner in a different geographic location.' Karla Otto, the German-born publicist who opened her agency in 1982 in Milan, had the connections Ms. Chouvet sought. With Ms. Chouvet as chief executive, the Independents group has gone on an ambitious acquisition spree. Names like Bureau Betak, Prodject, Lucien Pages, Kitten and Sunshine may not mean much to the average civilian, but within the increasingly all-encompassing world of luxury, fashion and cultural branding, the agencies in the Independents portfolio are as blue chip as they come. When Alessandro Michele wanted to turn his fall 2025 Paris fashion show for Valentino into a giant, blood-red David Lynchian public toilet, he hired Bureau Betak to stage the scene. For the past 14 years, Anna Wintour has not planned a Met Gala without Prodject, the firm responsible for implementing her vision — whether 'Camp," 'Heavenly Bodies,' 'Sleeping Beauties" or 'Superfine' — inside the museum. When Dior set about staging a Villa Dior presentation in Dali, China, it worked with K2 to realize it. The Independents now has 1,200 employees across offices in Barcelona, Beijing, Dubai, Hong Kong, Jeddah, London, Los Angeles, Milano, Munich, New York, Paris, Riyadh, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. The 2x4 agency and Terminal 9 Studios, a documentary film production company in Paris, are the most recent acquisitions. It's obvious why Ms. Chouvet would want to bundle these firms under one roof. The Independents group reported $800 million in revenue for 2024. She is far from the first to try to consolidate and capitalize on creative agencies. Venture capital roll-ups, in which a group of investors buy a bunch of agencies, eliminate redundancies, install a central administrative staff to cut costs and eventually take it public or sell to a mega group like Publicis are common practice. These deals come with pressure to deliver return on investment. Many of the agencies that have signed on with the Independents have spent their careers avoiding this acquisition model. 'It might work for tech companies or other things, but it doesn't work for creative industries,' Mr. Rock said. 'Whatever made that company great in the beginning is completely lost.' Yet Mr. Rock and his associates, whose clients include Prada, Chanel Arts and Culture, Nike, Instagram and Lincoln Center, signed over a majority stake to the Independents, which, from the outside, looks like a roll-up despite protests to the contrary. Ms. Chouvet said there is no exit strategy at the moment, and she has no financial or growth obligations to her investors. 'It's working so well because all of the interests are aligned, and everyone feels they are stronger by being together,' Ms. Chouvet said. 'There remains independence. That's why our name is the Independents.' The point of the group is to create a united network of partners who can work together, if they want to. 'By no means is it a forced march,' said Keith Baptista, a founder of Prodject. 'Nobody's telling me, 'You must work with this person.'' Many of the agencies have already shared clients for years. Bureau Betak does the design and production for Saint Laurent and Jacquemus fashion shows, and Lucien Pages does their PR. So what is the point, and where's the catch? If everyone was happily working together for decades on end with no shortage of business, why consolidate? Ms. Otto and Mr. de Betak used the sale to step back from the day-to-day of their agencies. She essentially retired, and he is now focusing on an art and architecture business. The practice of a principal exiting the business after a three-year earn-out period is common practice after a company is acquired. The idea that Ms. Chouvet is hoovering up a bunch of companies whose success hinges on the singular vision of the founder, just when the founder is looking to retire, is not a negligible one. 'You get to a certain age and you think about those kinds of things,' Mr. Rock said. We weren't looking to cash out like an exit strategy. We still want to work.' Why wouldn't he? A few weeks later, Mr. Rock was reached by phone to confirm the Pantone colors chosen for the Miu Miu Literary Club. He was at the airport, flying back from a weeklong photo shoot for Chanel in the South of France. 'I'm feeling very ragged,' Mr. Rock said. 'But we were at Coco Chanel's house on the Riviera, so it's kind of like … can't really complain.'
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Fondazione Prada Introduces 1.5 Million-euro Film Fund
MILAN — While tariffs looming over the film industry have led the conversation on the opening day of the Cannes Film Festival, Miuccia Prada has quietly upped the ante of her commitment and support to the seventh art. On Wednesday, Fondazione Prada revealed the creation of the Fondazione Prada Film Fund, a 1.5-million-euro yearly effort aimed at supporting independent cinema and works of high artistic value, further enhancing the cultural institution's 20-year commitment to the field. More from WWD Skin Care Pioneer Ole Henriksen Announces 'The Glowing Man' Biopic in Cannes At the Cannes Film Festival, Chanel Seeks More Than Red Carpet Credits A New Documentary Dives Behind the Scenes at Akris 'Cinema is for us a laboratory for new ideas and a space of cultural education. For this reason, we have decided to actively contribute to the realization of new works and to the support of auteur cinema,' Prada, who is president and director of the foundation, said in a statement. 'For over 20 years, the Fondazione has been investigating these languages in different ways, thus advocating a free, demanding and visionary idea of cinema. Through this fund we intend to deepen and broaden a dialogue with creation and contemporary experimentation.' The fund will debut in the fall via a call for entries. Each year, a jury will select 10 to 12 feature films with no geographical or genre restriction, basing its picks on criteria including quality, originality and vision. The jury will decide the specific financing for each movie selected, addressing films in three different phases such as development, production and post-production. The ultimate goal is to support heterogeneous works in terms of language, production scale and artistic vision to contribute to the plurality and vitality of contemporary cinema. The project has been developed by Paolo Moretti, curator of Fondazione Prada's Cinema Godard program, director of the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival from 2018 to 2022, head of the cinema department at ECAL — or École cantonale d'art de Lausanne — and director of Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva. He collaborated with Rebecca De Pas, a member of the selection committee at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and codirector of FiDLab — an international coproduction platform — from 2009 to 2019. This is the latest initiative in a long streak of film-related projects the cultural institution has launched to explore the art of filmmaking tracing back to the early 2000s. For instance, from 2003 to 2005, Fondazione Prada partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, presenting the preview of a film selection in New York and Milan, such as Chinese director Wong Kar-wai's feature film '2046.' From 2004 to 2006, in collaboration with the Venice Biennale, the foundation launched a film recovery and restoration program, involving a selection of forgotten or misunderstood Italian genre films shot between the '50s and the '70s; Chinese works distributed before the 1949 Revolution; rare films belonging to Japanese popular production, and Soviet musical comedy films from the 1930s to the '70s. Other projects through the years have ranged from Francesco Vezzoli's 'Trilogia della Morte' video installations inspired by two works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and presented in Venice and Milan to Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 'Flesh, Mind and Spirit' in 2009, featuring a selection of films that marked the director's education and artistic vision. This initiative paved the way for the 'Soggettiva' series of movie selections that has involved filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Danny Boyle and Ava DuVernay and artists such as John Baldessari, Damien Hirst, Goshka Macuga and Luc Tuymans, to name a few. The Fondazione Prada outpost in Milan itself is filled with movie references, starting from its highly Instagrammed café Bar Luce, designed by Wes Anderson and referencing two masterpieces of Italian Neorealism like Vittorio De Sica's 1951 film 'Miracle in Milan' and Luchino Visconti's 1960 movie ' Rocco and His Brothers.' In 2018, the cultural institution's Milan location launched a regular screening program in its movie theater, mixing classics, experimental works, previews and rare and restored movies. Masterclasses and public meetings with established and emerging figures on the international film scene — including Anderson and Almodóvar, as well as the likes of Spike Lee, Luca Guadagnino, Dario Argento, Alfonso Cuarón, Joanna Hogg and Xavier Dolan, to name a few — further contributed to drawing crowds to the movie theater. As reported, in 2023 Fondazione Prada renamed the theater Cinema Godard to pay permanent tribute to the French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. The move followed in the footsteps of Fondazione Prada becoming the only international institution to host two permanent projects by the late Franco Swiss director. Both were specifically conceived for the Milan venue and personally supervised by the filmmaker during their installation in 2019. For 'Le Studio d'Orphée,' Godard relocated his atelier and recording and editing studio to Fondazione Prada, setting a living and working space bringing together the original technical equipment used for his last films from 2010 to 2019, as well as furniture, books, paintings and other personal items from his studio home in Rolle, Switzerland. Here, visitors have the opportunity of attending the screening of his 2018 feature film 'Le Livre d'image' in the physical place where it was created. For the elevator of Fondazione Prada's Torre tower, Godard conceived 'Accent-soeur,' an audio installation combining the soundtrack of 'Histoire(s) du cinema,' an eight-part video project the director began in 1988 and completed in 1998 that narrates the complex history of 'the seventh art.' Currently, American director, writer and visual artist Miranda July's research project 'A Kind of Language' is on display at Fondazione Prada's Osservatorio outpost in Milan's landmark Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade. Running until Sept. 8, the exhibition investigates the creative process that precedes a film's realization, showcasing storyboards and other preparatory materials. Up next is an immersive exhibition conceived by Iñárritu that will open Sept. 18 and run through Feb. 26, 2026, and which will delve into the cultural and cinematographic dimension of the director's first feature film 'Amores Perros,' released in 2000. Best of WWD Salma Hayek's Fashion Evolution Through the Years: A Red Carpet Journey [PHOTOS] How Christian Dior Revolutionized Fashion With His New Look: A History and Timeline Cannes Film Festival's French Actresses Whose Iconic Style Shines on the Red Carpet [PHOTOS]
Vogue
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Addressed: How to Wear Shorts (and Look Good Doing It)
Introducing Addressed, a weekly column where we'll, ahem, address the joys (and tribulations!) of getting dressed. We'll look at runway and real-life trends, talk to people whose style we love, and, most importantly, answer your fashion queries. Download the Vogue app and find our Style Advice section to submit your question. As soon as the temperatures start to rise in late spring, I start thinking about idyllic warm-weather outfits for summer vacations still months away. Having just come back from Australia, where the Sydneysiders were characteristically showing off their love of shorts, I returned to New York ready to figure out the chicest way to show off a little (or a lot of) leg. In this edition of Addressed, we're answering the eternal question of how to wear shorts—and look good doing it. When talking about shorts, we first have to deal with the issue of length. Last year I declared that the nu-metal short—slightly baggy with hems right below the knee—the fit of the summer, and while looking through the recent collections, it seems that designers have agreed to keep it going for another season. That's great news for me; I wasn't ready to give them up. However, they aren't the only contenders; two years after Miuccia Prada proposed the idea that panties are acceptable bottoms to wear out in the world, micro shorts (their slightly more modest counterpart) are coming in strong. These opposing ideas—long, baggy, and masculine coded or extra short and literally inspired by women's underwear—actually make sense together. The times call for decisive ideas and decisive style; now is not the moment for wishy-washy, half-baked concoctions. We're going all or nothing. Having said that, the approach to dressing up both is basically the same. The biggest takeaway from the runways this year is to turn shorts into part of a suit or a coordinated ensemble. Imagine you're wearing a prim and proper skirt suit but then swap the skirt for shorts: At Valentino, cropped crochet jackets topped off lace-trim short shorts, while at Dries Van Noten, printed silk long shorts were worn with contrasting, just-as-relaxed silk jackets; in both instances the looks were fully put together. When you look at them, you see a whole look and not just a pair of shorts. But you don't have to go all out in heels and full makeup to make this foolproof formula work. At Willy Chavarria, for example, cutoff acid-wash jorts were paired with a button-down shirt and matching tie and topped off with an oversized jean jacket. There's nothing fussy about the look; because every piece is considered, the effect is cooler than cool and never sloppy.
Fashion Network
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
Miu Miu stages ‘Tales & Tellers' installation/performance project in New York
Miu Miu's 'Tales & Tellers' project was presented at the Terminal Warehouse in New York on May 10-11. 'Tales & Tellers' sits at the intersection of fashion, cinema and art, and is a site-specific installation and performance event inspired by the Miu Miu Women's Tales film project, and by the artistic elements featured in the Miu Miu runway shows held between the Spring/Summer 2022 and 2025 seasons. All of these events were developed with female creatives at their heart. 'Tales & Tellers' was originally conceived by Miuccia Prada as a constantly evolving project. It has been developed by multi-disciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba), Barcelona's contemporary art museum. The project blends different narratives and perspectives to explore the notion of femininity's constant transformation. It premièred in Paris in October 2024, and its second iteration was presented in New York on May 10-11. 'Tales & Tellers' is based on the concept of narration as a way to convey knowledge, and the notion that the storytellers are just as important as their stories' content. The project combines physical installations, videos and live performances. A single character is extrapolated from the artistic interventions at past Miu Miu runway shows, and from each of the films in the Women's Tales series created by Miu Miu since 2011, and the character's actions are reinterpreted by an actor, with the original video screened in parallel. The presentation is a collaboration between Macuga, Dyangani Ose and theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich, and included 36 performances, drawn from seven artistic interventions and the 29 films of Miu Miu's Women's Tales.
Fashion Network
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fashion Network
Miu Miu stages ‘Tales & Tellers' installation/performance project in New York
Miu Miu 's 'Tales & Tellers' project was presented at the Terminal Warehouse in New York on May 10-11. 'Tales & Tellers' sits at the intersection of fashion, cinema and art, and is a site-specific installation and performance event inspired by the Miu Miu Women's Tales film project, and by the artistic elements featured in the Miu Miu runway shows held between the Spring/Summer 2022 and 2025 seasons. All of these events were developed with female creatives at their heart. 'Tales & Tellers' was originally conceived by Miuccia Prada as a constantly evolving project. It has been developed by multi-disciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba), Barcelona's contemporary art museum. The project blends different narratives and perspectives to explore the notion of femininity's constant transformation. It premièred in Paris in October 2024, and its second iteration was presented in New York on May 10-11. 'Tales & Tellers' is based on the concept of narration as a way to convey knowledge, and the notion that the storytellers are just as important as their stories' content. The project combines physical installations, videos and live performances. A single character is extrapolated from the artistic interventions at past Miu Miu runway shows, and from each of the films in the Women's Tales series created by Miu Miu since 2011, and the character's actions are reinterpreted by an actor, with the original video screened in parallel. The presentation is a collaboration between Macuga, Dyangani Ose and theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich, and included 36 performances, drawn from seven artistic interventions and the 29 films of Miu Miu's Women's Tales.
