By Sara Fabek Zovko
Courtesy of MiuMiu
Another year, another iconic Miu Miu Upcycled collection — this time with a full wardrobe!
The 2024 winter season has brought with it the fifth limited edition Miu Miu Upcycled collection. The brand’s increasingly popular campaign focuses on the concept of cyclical fashion, breathing new life into vintage garments and bags. This year’s holiday campaign collection, fronted by actress Emma Corrin, ranges from cozy knitwear to chic leather outerwear.
The Miu Miu Upcycled range, launched in 2020, has become a pinnacle of the brands commitment to sustainable design, emphasising their values and alignment with environmental and ethical values that are being increasingly highlighted within the fashion industry. Throughout its existence, the range has launched a wide assortment of items, including handbags, denim and dresses. Presenting four mini-collections, the 2024 holiday collection sees the Miu Miu Upcycled collection presenting a full wardrobe for the first time since its conception. As the industry zeroes in on sustainability, both in discussion and formal regulation, the collection is a crucial move to present sustainability as less of an online trend and more of a long-term industry goal.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the Miu Miu Upcycled collection and its impact is the manner in which the brand underlines that there is no need to sacrifice style for the sake of sustainable fashion. If it wasn’t clear in the brand’s previous Upcycled collections, this year’s range of materials and the stories behind them have certainly cemented this as fact. Starting with patchwork leather jackets that inarguably embody the SS11 and AW24 Miu Miu collections, the collection also presents a new take on kilts, knitwear and accessories branded with the iconic Miu Miu logo —all created from vintage pieces.
Courtesy of MiuMiu
It may seem simple, but upcycling is an art form. As thrifting has gained traction in the past few years, so has adjusting found items to one’s liking. Ranging from Depop accounts to stores in known thrifting hotspots like Brick Lane, upcycling isn’t a new concept as such. With the rise of thrifting, it has become common for those who love finding the new in the old to adjust what they find to their liking. Whether it be cutting a skirt shorter, completely restructuring an item or combining multiple finds into one garment, it is now a way to create one’s ideal wardrobe in an ethical, sustainable way.
The trends that have dominated the past few years have brought thrifting and upcycling to the forefront. Miu Miu’s Upcycled, however, is a masterclass in combining vintage and modern, bold and classic, thereby creating a path that other big brand names are sure to follow. In light of the new ESG sustainability regulations, taking a more serious approach to how collections are created in regards to environmental effect will become compulsory for bigger names —Miu Miu is simply ahead of the curve.
By cementing a legacy of fashionable, desirable upcycled items for four years running (and with many more to come), the brand has created a blueprint for sustainable fashion, disproving the unspoken yet omnipresent idea that quality or style has to be compromised for the sake of an ethical and environmentally friendly collection. The leap into the second-life approach towards vintage clothing —before it becomes a necessity within the industry, has arguably been one of the better decisions made by a high-end fashion brand in the past four years.
Miu Miu Upcycled has become a collection to look forward to for every fashion lover, and while the past 4 years of Upcycled have rendered expectations high, they have also set a precedent for other brands’ ventures into sustainability to be just as beloved. This timeless approach to sustainability that treats clothing as art deserving of a new life is more than likely to gain traction within the industry, and deliver impeccable collections —much like the Miu Miu Upcycled has been.
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