Miu Miu expands its Upcycled initiative with Grande Envie, a short film directed by four-time Academy Award winner Catherine Martin. Known for her iconic work in costume and production design, Martin steps behind the camera for the first time to present the new Upcycled collection in a haunting love triangle set in the French Riviera of the late 1920s.
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Launched in 2020, Miu Miu Upcycled transforms carefully sourced vintage garments into reimagined designs aligned with the brand’s aesthetic. Martin’s short film expands on this concept through narrative. Starring Callina Liang, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Diana Silvers, Eliot Sumner, Daisy Ridley, and Willem Dafoe, Grande Envie tells the story of a widowed Count, his ghostly wife, and three mysterious visitors at a seaside chateau. The film overlays glamour, desire, and supernatural tension, collapsing eras and suggesting that the past always lingers, an idea central to both the narrative and the collection.
Martin’s designs for the Upcycled collection pull inspiration from the photography of Jacques Henri Lartigue and the contrasting styles of the interwar years. The result is an eclectic mix of delicate lingerie worn with striped t-shirts, denim paired with eveningwear, and rowing blazers reimagined for warm-weather hedonism. The designs embrace the clash of utilitarian and ornate, masculine and feminine, vintage and contemporary, a visual echo of the film’s ghostly themes and the era’s cultural crosscurrents.
The tailoring is where contrasts are pushed furthest: bias-cut gowns made from t-shirts, vintage scarves shaped into foulard halters, lace used as structural counterpoint to tailored suiting. According to Martin, these juxtapositions evoke the South of France’s beach culture of the time, when art, pleasure, and politics collided in sun-drenched freedom. “Miu Miu Upcycled gives new life to old clothes,” Martin explains, “and in the process, transforms them into the ultimate luxury, where love and attention make something more precious than it was before.”
Photographer Michella Bredahl complements Martin’s vision with campaign images that portray the cast as dreamlike figures drifting through the faded grandeur of the chateau. Captured in golden afternoon light, they haunt staircases, gardens, and empty salons, suggesting lives once lived and never fully forgotten.
Grande Envie and the accompanying Upcycled collection will debut at Miu Miu’s New Bond Street store in London on June 7, where it will be available exclusively for two weeks before launching in select stores worldwide on June 21. This project reflects Martin’s enduring fascination with costume, sustainability, and cinema, all central to her artistic identity. “Romanticism and ethical sensibility,” she says, “are not in contradiction.” Through her vision, past and present meet in every reconstructed piece.
