Miuccia Prada’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection for Miu Miu examines the meaning and visibility of women’s work.
Entitled At Work, the collection explores the significance, challenges and experiences that define women’s labour, confronting its historical invisibility and revaluing its social and aesthetic importance.
The collection treats work not only as a necessity but as a symbol of care, love and independence. It considers clothing as both functional and expressive, reflecting agency and self-determination. Central to the theme is the apron, viewed as a universal emblem of work. Traditionally associated with domesticity and service, it is reframed here as an object of dignity and respect. Its dual nature, both utilitarian and decorative, embodies the contradictions of women’s labour, which spans professional, domestic and emotional domains.
Throughout the collection, Miuccia Prada reflects on how garments evolve in meaning depending on context and material. The apron becomes a metaphor for the multiple layers of women’s identity, bridging physical work and caregiving, industry and artistry. Each piece gestures to the varied and often unseen contributions that women make to both private and public spheres.
The visual and material language of the collection draws inspiration from documentary photography by Dorothea Lange and Helga Paris, whose work chronicled the realities of women in factory and everyday settings. Through this lens, the collection reflects a truthfulness to labour and to the lived experience of clothes. Industrial materials such as drill cotton, leather, raw canvas and silk cloque appear alongside lace and embroidery, highlighting the tension between toughness and delicacy.
Shoes and handbags reinforce these contrasts, designed in muscular leathers that evoke both utility and strength. Ruffles, traditionally feminine, are reimagined with a sense of industrial resilience. The interplay between hardness and softness underscores the collection’s broader interrogation of social expectations and the definitions of femininity.
The show’s scenography at the Palais d’Iéna complements this vision. The historic hypostyle space, itself a site of work, was transformed into an abstracted representation of domestic labour. Fields of Formica tables in contrasting tones punctuated the setting, translating the theme of everyday work into architectural form.
Through At Work, Miu Miu presents a study in function, femininity and purpose, offering a meditation on what it means to make, to labour and to live within the fabric of work itself.
