Prada Offshoot Shows Up in Paris

Paris fashion week finished yesterday by showing what a label will do to justify its designer status and, perhaps more pressingly, its prices.

Miu Miu is the younger, less expensive and very successful offshoot of Prada, although in recent years the company has been issuing nervily emphatic decrees that it is not to be described as such but to be seen as an independent label in its own right. To emphasize this separation between the two brands, yesterday Miu Miu held its fashion show for the first time in Paris instead of in Milan, where Prada showed last week.

Designers moving from London to Milan for status is commonplace; moving from London to Paris even more so. But moving from Milan to Paris is unique because Milan is a major fashion centre, so moving to Paris is superfluous, unless a company was trying to make a specific point. Miuccia Prada was keen to stress what this point is at her show yesterday. Asked for her reasons for moving the show to Paris she replied: "So Miu Miu is seen as important in its own right, and not just a younger label."

The collection, however, was still a young one, but certainly not a cheap one. Models languorously strolled through the salon in wedges so high and ornate they could have been mini-Corinthian columns, and in elegant dresses made out of heavy brocade fabrics more commonly associated with British country hotels.

However, it is hard to imagine who could wear a brocade puffball skirt but someone born after 1975, and even harder to imagine many people from that demographic being able to afford handpainted clothes.

Possibly the reason the Prada group is so keen to stress Miu Miu’s legitimacy lies in the rise of diffusion labels which are cheaper, younger versions that a designer makes of his own collection.