Miu Miu’s Bewitching Film

Is it the woman who makes the dress or the dress that makes the woman? Regardless of where your answer falls, your interest will be piqued by “The Woman Dress,” a new short film, the third in Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series, which will premiere at an exclusive party tonight. The brand enlisted Italian director Giada Colagrande, whose recent work “A Woman” starred Wilem Dafoe, to create a movie taking inspiration from its designs and showcasing exclusively female talents (the first two films in the series were directed by Zoe Cassavetes and Lucrecia Martel).

Colagrande seemed slightly taken with the macabre, turning first to catacombs in Palermo, Italy as a jumping off point for her bewitching tale.

“It’s five centuries old and all of the bodies are divided based on their jobs and wearing the dress of their category, like a priest or a lawyer,” explains Colagrande. “When you look at their corpses, you can’t see their faces, but because they’re dressed in different ways, you associate a different identity with them. It shows how even a dress can give an image of you as strong as a personal identity.”

Besides wearing Miu Miu ready-to-wear, the four female leads also sport lens from the label’s new Culte sunglasses line, whose octagonal frames Colagrande found perfect to express the mad scientists air of the witches’ ritual. (The glasses hit stores in May.)

“I like the idea that they were proposing we start with the dress rather than the opposite which we normally do when you’re making a movie, you think of a character and then anything that makes the character is what they wear,” she says. “In this case I had to invent the characters inspired by the dresses. So the dresses really became my lead characters.”

Click below to view the film in full:

Photos: courtesy of miumiu.com