Catherine Martin leads the new Miu Miu Upcycled collection accompanied by her debut short film Grande Envie and campaign photography by Michella Bredahl.
Miu Miu collaborates with four-times Academy Award winning costume-, production- and set-designer Catherine Martin on a special collection for Miu Miu Upcycled, which also marks Martin’s directorial debut with a talent-rich short film entitled Grande Envie.
Launched in 2020, Miu Miu Upcycled is a series of special collections of vintage pieces reworked and transformed by Miu Miu, carefully sourced from stores and markets focused on vintage clothing around the world, created to promote circular design practices. The project began with a selection of vintage dresses, reinterpreted with Miu Miu’s aesthetic codes. Inspired by circular business models, the project develops a contemporary cultural attitude by giving new life to pre-owned and pre-loved clothes.
Catherine Martin’s short film, Grande Envie, is a ghost love-triangle story starring Callina Liang, Daisy Ridley, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Diana Silvers, Eliot Sumner and with a special appearance by Willem Dafoe. Martin summons the late 1920s and early 1930s in the South of France, “a dynamic, in-between period, between the world wars, where great clashes and contrasts in style were taking place,” she explains. Set in an opulent chateau, a widowed Count (Willem Dafoe) meets three young strangers, who are full of “desire for adventure” this summer. But then, the deceased Countess (Daisy Ridley) haunts her widowed husband through the lens of a camera, collapsing then and now, amongst youthful decadence and yearning.
Martin draws inspiration from that historical haven for artists and writers all looking for escape and creative freedom. In particular, Martin reveals, the 1920s photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue – which captured fleeting modern life, only to be discovered in the 1960s – have shaped the aesthetics of her Miu Miu Upcycled collection.
