Miu Miu Menswear Is Here. Can It Live Up to Women's?
Miu Miu ain't Prada's little sister anymore. The 30-year-old womenswear line is a proper luxury powerhouse, setting the industry's pace by dishing vital collections, accessories, and ideas that reshape fashion in real-time.
It's not even hyperbolic to proclaim that Miu Miu is currently fashion's most important brand — actual data backs that up.
So, now that some of Miu Miu's womenswear clothes are finally being offered in menswear sizes, the question is: can they possibly compare to Miu Miu women's?
Well, yeah, duh. Miu Miu men's is just Miu Miu women's but larger. How could it not be good?
Not bad for what was once a sub-label within a sub-label.
Founded in 1992, Miu Miu has patiently evolved with the times. Like Prada itself, it was never not relevant but really only shifted into maximum overdrive within the past five or so years.
If there's a singular locus where Miu Miu went from cool to killer, it must be Spring/Summer 2022. That was the season that introduced the low-rise skirt set that smashed the internet.
Miu Miu mastered its low-rise looks for Fall/Winter 2022, also the first collection to reintroduce Miu Miu menswear.
But though Miu Miu men's returned for the first time in nearly fifteen years, it was barely a footnote in the stacked collection.
Ballet flats! Tennis skirts! Biker boots! New Balance dad shoes!
Miu Miu FW22 presented tomorrow's clothes today, cannily forecasting contemporary trends over a year in advance.
That's the thing about Miu Miu — part of what makes its clothes so great is that they're also staggeringly prescient. No one in the biz has better foresight into what people actually want to wear than Miuccia Prada, Miu Miu in the flesh.
Though it only showed up thrice in the 65-look Spring/Summer 2023 collection, Miu Miu menswear used its second season to find its footing.
It was present only about five-ish times in the similarly-sized Fall/Winter 2023 offering — not even 10% of the collection! — but, this time, it was worn by recognizable house representatives like Noen Eubanks. The next season, Troye Sivan hit the catwalk — the Miu Miu man has found his chiseled face.
FW23 was also the first time that Miu Miu men's began rolling out en masse to stockists.
It's been vaguely available on Miu Miu's site in limited quantities for some time — Miu Miu lists its clothes as co-ed instead of specifically designating anything as "menswear" — but the latest collection is the first to be widely sold at third-party Miu Miu retailers.
This newly-available Miu Miu menswear stuff gives you a pretty clear picture of how good Miu Miu men's is as a whole.
And it's really, really good.
One of the reasons that menswear at Miu Miu's sibling, Prada, currently feels so right is because, even at its most adventurous, it remains grounded.
Prada has always specialized in "real" clothes — another way to say "fancy versions of ordinary garments" — that're eternally sophisticated, eternally stylish. No pretense, no playing into trends, just ageless aspiration.
Miu Miu menswear provides the perfect youthful counterpoint to Prada's mature ready-to-wear.
Whereas the Prada man wears crisp overcoats and tailored slacks, his little Miu Miu-wearing cousin is slouching around in raw-hemmed denim overshirts and garment-dyed work pants. Chic office drone versus e-boy.
It's the Italian luxury sk8r boi to the saucy librarians of Miu Miu women's.
To the uninitiated, Miu Miu men's offers extremely expensive but otherwise conventional clothing.
To the trained eye, they're deliciously indulgent iterations of the real stuff that real dudes really want to wear in real life: work jackets, pre-faded hoodies, washed-out denim.
No wonder Miu Miu men's is selling so well already: one €2,780 (about $3k) denim hoodie is nearly sold-out on one site and a bouclé wool jacket is half-way to gone on another.
The $1,000 Miu Miu undies? Long since sold-out in all three sizes.
Again, guys want this stuff because it's what they want. It's supremely uncomplicated — both the clothes and the concept.
Here's where Miu Miu menswear differs from the womenswear, though. Whereas Miu Miu men's is now, women's is the future.
That's more a feature of menswear than a bug in Miu Miu's oeuvre, mind you. Tapping into today's zeitgeist is nearly as tricky as crystal-balling tomorrow's trend, especially when you're working in the left-brain v. right-brain worlds of menswear and womenswear.
The fact that Miu Miu can do both arguably better than any of its peers is nothing short of a miracle. A Miu-racle, if you will.
