Miu Miu this year marks a milestone: 30th chapter of its Women’s Tales film series. Acclaimed French filmmaker Alice Diop directed the episode Fragments for Venus for the series. Premiering at Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori on August 30, the film is a meditation on representation, history, and the radical joy of selfhood
Miu Miu is once again the hottest brand in the world. According to Lyst’s Q2 2025 Index, the label has reclaimed the number-one spot, reaffirming its global influence in fashion. But to call Miu Miu simply a fashion brand would be missing the point. Beyond runways and viral moments, it has become a cultural platform, one that dares to speak for women, and about women. Nowhere is this more evident than in Miu Miu Women’s Tales, the brand’s pioneering short film series that has, for over a decade, redefined how fashion can tell stories of femininity and power.
Alice Diop: from the margins to the center
Alice Diop has built her career by amplifying voices from the margins. Known for documentaries like La Permanence and Vers la tendresse, and her Venice-winning fiction debut Saint Omer (2022), Diop has become one of the most incisive chroniclers of motherhood, migration, and justice. She describes Fragments for Venus as the work is simple and radical work to date, a film that seeks both political clarity and intimate self-celebration.
Fragments for Venus: rewriting the gaze
The 21-minute short follows two black women, one wandering through a museum, tracing how Western art has long objectified black female bodies; another moving through the streets of Brooklyn, finding new incarnations of Venus in the women she sees. It’s a visual dialogue between past and present, between the silenced depictions of history and the vibrancy of lived reality.
Diop’s inspiration came from Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), a landmark poem that catalogs centuries of Western art descriptions of black women. The film translates this into a “filmic gesture” of repair, an act of reclaiming narrative space, celebrating black women not as subjects of the gaze but as voices of their own.
The soundtrack underscores this reclamation. Meshell Ndegeocello’s Thus Sayeth the Lorde transforms the words of queer black poet Audre Lorde into a powerful canticle against injustice. It is not just a score but a call to arms, layering rhythm over resistance.
Women’s tales: fashion as cultural witness
Since its launch in 2011, Miu Miu Women’s Tales has become the longest-running female-led short film platform, commissioning 30 unique stories from visionary directors including Chloé Zhao, Lucrecia Martel, and Joanna Hogg. Each film merges the language of cinema with the spirit of Miu Miu, where clothes act not merely as costumes, but as characters within the narrative.
For Miuccia Prada, the series has always been about more than fashion. It is about conversation: women talking about women, reframing femininity in all its contradictions and possibilities. Fragments for Venus continues this lineage, proving once again that Miu Miu is not just designing for women, but dialoguing with them.
Miu Miu just more than a label. From topping global fashion rankings to premiering radical feminist cinema, Miu Miu today exists in a rare space: as both cultural tastemaker and cultural witness. With Alice Diop’s Fragments for Venus, the brand reminds us that style and storytelling are inseparable, that every collection, every film, every gesture is part of a larger narrative of empowerment.
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