Miu Miu’s current collaboration with Academy Award winning costume, production and set designer Catherine Martin on a special collection for Miu Miu Upcycled, also marks Martin’s directorial debut, with her short film entitled Grande Envie launched at the Cannes Film Festival 2025 featuring a cast of in-the-moment talent!
Catherine Martin’s short film, Grande Envie starring Callina Liang, Daisy Ridley, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Diana Silvers, Eliot Sumner and with a special guest appearance by Willem Dafoe, Martin summons the atmosphere and feeling of the late 1920s and early 1930s in the South of France. Drawing inspiration from that historical haven for artists and writers, all looking for escape and creative freedom, the film is set in an opulent chateau. A widowed Count (Willem Dafoe) meets three young strangers, who are full of “desire for adventure” until the deceased Countess (Daisy Ridley), haunting her widowed husband through the lens of a camera, collapses ‘then and now’ amongst a scenography of youthful decadence and yearning. 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.
Launched in 2020, Miu Miu Upcycled is a series of special collections of vintage pieces reworked and transformed by Miu Miu, which have been carefully sourced from stores and markets focused on vintage clothing around the world. Created to promote circular design practices and reinterpreted with Miu Miu’s aesthetic codes, in adhering to contemporary cultural attitudes of revival, they give a renewed life to pre-owned and pre-loved clothes.
When it comes to her approach, Martin was fascinated by Miu Miu Upcycled collections and the ethos of changing the meaning of a piece of clothing by using it in a completely different way. Her way of seeing this endeavour through storytelling was also – like the Countess character in her short film – “the past haunting the present.” Martin believes that, “Miu Miu Upcycled gives new life to old clothes, and in the process, transforms them into the ultimate luxury, where love and attention makes something more precious than it was before.”
Asked about her three-decade long working relationship with Miuccia Prada, Catherine Martin replies, “It works so well because we are all interested in a rigorous and exacting intellectual process which deals with the human experience today.” For Martin, romanticism and ethical sensibility are not in contradiction.
Grande Envie and the campaign are all about desires. This spirit defines the new Miu Miu Upcycled collection: where our greater awareness of clothing’s lifespan is transformed by an intimate creative language of reinterpretation and renewal.
“It draws together things that don’t necessarily belong together: There are clashes of the pretty and the vulgar but brought together in a beautiful way, just like it was in the 1920s and 1930s. What fascinates me about the collection is this constant juxtaposition of the utilitarian and the precious.” Contrasts define the tailoring. “These looks speak to the nautical hedonistic beach culture,” Martin reveals, “which were represented so vividly in the photos of the period.”
Campaign Photography: Michella Bredahl / Campaign Art Direction: Edward Quarmby / Styling: Lotta Volkova
Miu Miu Upcycled by Catherine Martin will make its debut at the New Bond Street store in London on June 7, exclusively available there for two weeks, and from June 21 in selected stores worldwide.
For more information visit miumiu.com.