Miuccia Prada – Running With Scissors

Nearly three decades after founding Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada is at the peak of her artistic powers, even making one very tiny miniskirt go very viral

- By Rachel Tashjian

Miuccia Prada is not strictly a self-made woman. The company she revolutionized from a dusty luggage business to a paragon of luxury fashion was started by her grandfather. But she is certainly a self-fashioned one. She dyes her own hair honey blond. She cuts it herself too (though she might let hairstylist Guido Palau give her a snip backstage before a show). She is a woman who takes things into her own hands, whether that means ideas, projects, or skirt lengths. Posing for Tyler Mitchell for this photo shoot, she took out a pair of scissors and lopped off her hemline, right then and there. "There is a pleasure in cutting," she tells me.

The pleasure of cutting is what has propelled Miu Miu, Mrs. Prada's other fashion line, to be a viral phenomenon over the past year. When Mrs. Prada, as she is known in the industry, sent models down the runway last fall in chopped-off miniskirts-so short, the lining of the pockets was exposed-and hacked-off sweaters showing a practically mannerist expanse of abdomen, people went out of their minds. TikTok was filled with 20-somethings showing followers how to cut up their own skirts to create the look at home; as of this writing, #miumiu has more than 695 million views on the platform. During the first three months of 2022, searches for the brand were up 400 percent because of the miniskirt set, according to the Lyst Index. By February, nearly every magazine had put a star or a model in a version of the look; Nicole Kidman told an interviewer that she had yanked it off of stylist Katie Grand's rack for the cover of Vanity Fair, which unleashed a days-long conversation about dressing your age (zzzzzz!). On Instagram, someone started an account dedicated to tracking its appearances (@miumiuset). As one viral tweet put it, "That Miu Miu skirt set being passed around like a blunt."