A Story Worn Twice: Catherine Martin’s Ghostly Glamour for Miu Miu Upcycled

Memory can be soft. Lace-lined. Lipsticked. For Catherine Martin — the mind behind some of cinema’s most extravagant costuming — nostalgia is not something to escape, but to dress up and direct. With Grande Envie, her hauntingly tender directorial debut for Miu Miu Upcycled, she doesn’t just reimagine vintage garments — she stages them in a cinematic loop of longing, desire, and quiet excess.

Shot like a dream and stitched with contradiction, the project becomes something more than a collaboration. It’s an invitation: to wear your past like perfume, to treat fashion as a séance.

The project is a double vision: part fashion collection, part short film. Set in a decadent château somewhere between the 1920s and the subconscious, the film stars Daisy Ridley, Willem Dafoe, and a cast of wayward souls who drift through bedrooms, staircases, and cigarette-drenched gardens. Everyone looks haunted — but chic. Martin calls it “a love story between eras,” and that tension bleeds into the clothes.

Upcycled, yes. But also unraveled, rewritten, re-romanticized.

Since 2020, the Miu Miu Upcycled series has transformed vintage garments sourced from global flea markets into limited-edition pieces with new narrative lives. This season, Martin brings her world-building genius — honed on Baz Luhrmann’s sets — into the Miu Miu universe. Think: striped rugby shirts over silk slips, boxer briefs tailored into genderless outerwear, beach pants sewn from secondhand scarves. The silhouettes are playful, the styling intuitive — where utilitarian meets precious, and nothing is what it first appears to be.

“I’m fascinated by how something as simple as a striped tee or a satin slip can hold memory,” Martin says. “We’re not just designing clothes — we’re interrupting timelines.”

That collision is literal. Grande Envie is haunted by its own past: Daisy Ridley’s character — a long-dead Countess — observes her widower husband’s flirtations from behind the veil of the lens, a phantom watching the summer play out like cinema. This idea of “the past disturbing the present” becomes the collection’s secret lining. The fabric choices, too, echo archival decadence — cottons pulled from 1920s swimwear silhouettes, Chantilly lace drenched in shadow.

Photographer Michella Bredahl captures it all in a sun-drunk haze. Her campaign images for the collection feel less like fashion photos and more like recovered memories. Models lounge like lost spirits across antique chaises, looking for something — maybe glamour, maybe closure. The styling by Lotta Volkova is intentionally dissonant, creating beauty in the awkward, the mismatched, the overdone.

This is not fashion that demands attention — it seduces it slowly.

Martin describes her collaboration with Miuccia Prada as “rigorously intellectual and deeply emotional.” And that makes sense. This is not just about recycling fabrics, but about honoring their ghosts. Each piece in the collection — debuting June 7 at Miu Miu New Bond Street in London — carries the DNA of multiple lives, multiple aesthetics, multiple selves. It is both luxurious and lived-in, intimate and impossible.

And that, perhaps, is the real fantasy.