Now, under Miu Miu, she’s just launched a new short film, this time directed by longtime collaborator and close friend Catherine Martin, in honour of the house’s latest Upcycled collection. There’s a chance that Martin’s name might not immediately ring any bells, but you’ll definitely be familiar with her work. Scoring multiple Oscars for costume design and production across the course of the last 40 years, Martin is the creative mind behind the wardrobes of movies including Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and, more recently, the technicolour biopic Elvis, in which Austin Butler played the gyrating titular character. She’s long had Miuccia on speed dial, with Prada creating Claire Danes’ iconic angel-winged white gown and Leonardo DiCaprio’s boxy blue wedding suit in Romeo + Juliet, and kitting Butler out as Elvis across the entire 2022 film.

Working on a something with Miu Miu in a more direct way has been on the cards for ages, Martin confirms as she logs on to a Zoom call from New York and we talk a week before the Grande Envie’s launch. Initially, though,  she was nervous about stepping out from the costume department and into the director’s chair. It was her husband, Baz Luhrmann, who calmed her down and convinced her to stop panicking. “I was actually completely terrified,” she laughs, remembering when initial conversations with the house amped up. “Baz came up behind me, put his hands between my shoulder blades and said ‘you’re going to do it’. I said I wasn’t sure if I had the chops, and he really convinced me to just get on with it.” Martin needn’t have worried: the sun-drenched short that just got its debut is hauntingly beautiful, capturing the heady, hazy days of late summer and all the yearning that goes alongside.

“There’s that thing of possibility and desire and a slight danger to Jacques Henri Lartigue’s pictures. Not danger in a negative sense, danger in the way of exhilaration, that you chase when you’re young” – Catherine Martin 

Originally, Martin was inspired by the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue, whose early images depict life in the South of France. There’s a candid, ephermeral quality to them, with Lartigue capturing the joy and freedom of youth from behind his lens. “He had a super interesting life. He was an amateur photographer when he was six years old, and we wasn’t discovered until the 1960s when he was in his 60s,” says Martin. “His work is so modern, you can’t believe how fresh his photos are. They could have been taken yesterday.” As well as what Martin describes as “a feeling of perpetual movement”, there’s a lack of self-consciousness to his work that had Martin hooked. “There’s that thing of possibility and desire and a slight danger to his pictures,” she adds. “Not danger in a negative sense, danger in the way of exhilaration, that you chase when you’re young.”

With the the Grande Envie also captured in the South of France and set between the First and Second World Wars, Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe take on the lead roles of the Count and the spectre of the Countess, with a number of house faces making up the wider cast. Martin says that the full project was completely collaborative, from the Upcycled collection itself to the casting and beyond. “But, I mean, you’re not going to turn down working with Willem Dafoe, are you?” Martin laughs again. With a stint on the Prada runway circa 2012 under his belt, Dafoe made his Miu Miu debut in Paris for SS25, so his starring role in the film is a full circle moment of sorts.

The collection itself is emblematic of Martin’s longstanding love affair with Miu Miu’s clothes, of which she admits she has “a lot” stuffed in her own closet. For this offering, she loved the idea of bringing together disparate fabrics and imbuing old clothes with new meaning, sending them off to make new memories with new owners. Taking existing pieces from the archives and transforming them into fresh garments, the line this time is heavy on preppy striped jersey t-shirts, rowing blazers, and denim pieces which, with the help of house stylist Lotta Volkova, are mixed in with loads of delicate, diaphanous, vintage lace. It’s that very Miu Miu tension that takes something utilitarian and clashes it with something decorative – it shouldn’t necessarily work, but it does. 

“There’s an absolutely divine, dramatic dress that Jasmine [Savoy Brown] wears that’s made entirely of vintage lace,” Martin explains. “I think what I found so interesting about this initiative is the way it combines the precious with the most discardable. I love the idea of the elevation of the t-shirt, which is ultimately one of the most disposable things on the planet, and actually making it a precious object again.” For Martin, the project was also a poignant one in that it made her really sit and consider her own consumption and impact on the world. “I am part of the problem when it comes to that, you know? I very much acknowledge it and am grappling with what I can do and how I move forward,” she says. “For me it’s about how you imbue fashion and clothes with value, so that your consumption becomes more metered. I’m not saying this is going to solve it, but everyone has to start somewhere.”

Watch the short above and click through the gallery for a closer look at the collection.