Gallery

Miu Miu reveals "Suddenly Next Summer", the third campaign by photographer Alasdair McLellan.

This season the British photographer works with actress Elle Fanning and a cast of women who represent the ever-shifting spectrum of fashion industry visibility: icons Karen Elson, Carolyn Murphy, and Lara Stone appear with slate of new talent. The setting: the proverbial carefree, sun-soaked beach that recalls countess summer films from ‘Il Sorpasso’ to ‘Beach Blanket Bingo’. But beneath the sunny surface, “Suddenly Next Summer” continues Miu Miu’s interrogation of contemporary femininity and nebulous terms like actor, it girl, model, and celebrity.

The metaphor of the ocean - mysterious, vast, and deep - is overlaid with pictures of uninhibited joy. The collages, composed as they are of multiple layers of thin images, reinstate the notion of the constructed identity: the creative role every woman takes on when imagining and organizing her public-facing life.

The Miu Miu SS’17 collection is in itself a collage of fun, feminine fashion evoking disparate eras, aesthetics, and guides for so-called age-appropriate dress. It is the next iteration of Miuccia Prada’s twisting and turning meditation on what a woman wants to wear, what she is expected to wear, what she has worn, what she can wear, and where those shifting ideas collide. The pairings of sumptuous leather purses and rubber swim caps further themes of exaggeration and discontinuity: patterns are blown up and dimensionalized on everything from coats to knit bikinis. Here, as always, the Miu Miu girl escapes neat classification or obvious stereotype. Her multivalent personality traverse categories of career and social class, just as her beachwear sets up markers of femininity only to confound them.