Miu Miu unites with Church’s on this season’s cult shoes
Monk-strap shoes and brogues feature in the new Church’s x Miu Miu collaboration, which infuses the footwear brand’s classic heritage with the Italian house’s free-spirited vision
In recent seasons, there are few garments that have proved quite as ubiquitous as Miu Miu’s sawn-off micro-mini skirt, shown as part of the Italian house’s S/S 2022 collection and riffed upon in the seasons that followed (including an equally viral mini tennis skirt and matching polo for A/W 2022).
It placed the Italian fashion house – founded by Miuccia Prada in 1992 as the playful and provocative counterpart to Prada – squarely as the centre of the contemporary fashion zeitgeist, with shopping app Lyst naming it Brand of the Year for 2022. It’s a defining role the house has continued into 2023: this past February in Paris, for her A/W 2023 collection, the designer proposed librarian-style cardigans, low-slung pencil skirts (the waistband of Miu Miu-branded tights revealed beneath), and models with purposefully ruffled hair. The runway images immediately flooded social media.
Introducing Church’s x Miu Miu
‘[This collection is about] how fashion and fashion design can change perceptions, of things we think we know,’ Miuccia Prada said of the collection, which played on quotidian dress codes. ‘It’s an invitation to reconsider.’
Included in the collection were pairs of double monk-strap shoes and brogues, a collaboration with historic British footwear brand Church’s that has been revealed in full today (24 August 2023) in a new campaign. A play on a perennial classic, the glossy black and tobacco leather styles will no doubt become one of the season’s most-desired styles, cut with a rounder, broader shape than the original Church’s styles from which they took their inspiration. Sporty moulded rubber replaces Church’s classic smooth-leather soles.
‘[The collaboration] infuses the formality of the heritage brand with the free spirit the Miu Miu name represents,’ says the house.
The accompanying campaign mines this feeling of juxtaposition: models recline on patterned ’gentleman’s’ armchairs, their shoes resting on the Miu Miu-designed upholstery and striking typically idiosyncratic poses. Coloured tights are worn throughout, setting a blueprint of how to wear the style during the season ahead.
‘Miu Miu’s signature play between the traditional and the contemporary is upheld,’ the accompanying blurb continues. ‘The reassurance of the familiar is at once celebrated and subverted – undone - to create something new.’
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Church's x Miu Miu products will be available in to preorder on miumiu.com from August 29, 2023 and in Miu Miu stores from September 6, 2023.
Jack Moss is the Fashion Features Editor at Wallpaper*, joining the team in 2022. Having previously been the digital features editor at AnOther and digital editor at 10 and 10 Men magazines, he has also contributed to titles including i-D, Dazed, 10 Magazine, Mr Porter’s The Journal and more, while also featuring in Dazed: 32 Years Confused: The Covers, published by Rizzoli. He is particularly interested in the moments when fashion intersects with other creative disciplines – notably art and design – as well as championing a new generation of international talent and reporting from international fashion weeks. Across his career, he has interviewed the fashion industry’s leading figures, including Rick Owens, Pieter Mulier, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Christian Lacroix, Kate Moss and Manolo Blahnik.
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