Miu Miu Fall 1999 Ready-to-Wear Collection

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 featuring Miu Miu menswear, a line that was active for a decade (1998-2008), and around which a nostalgic cult has developed. It’s impossible to relive the past, but documenting it is a different story…. 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, whose gist is that each thinks the other is hot. ‘I think young guys are so charming,” Miuccia Prada told the critic. “I like the way young people are different and so sweet with each other.” Besides being a nice sentiment, it was also good business; 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 form the largest audience of teenagers in history.” That meant a lot of attention was being paid to these 2.0 Youthquakers, and to chasing youth, both at the box office (the writer suggested Romeo + Juliet kicked off the trend for teen drama in entertainment) and on the shop floor.

In this collection Mrs. Prada seemed to have made the leap from match sticks to matching; the men’s and women’s looks were more aligned than they had been the previous season. Once again there was an emphasis on the outdoors, which was expressed through the palette, the hiking boots, and the use of “natural” materials like suede and shearling. At the same time some shoes had rubber soles and others holographic patterns. The ad campaign found the models in a futuristic box through which a nighttime cityscape could be spied. They appeared to be suspended in space as they sat and lounged on windows, looking through panes of glass at the world—come to think of it, that’s pretty much how we use our phones 25 years later.