A conveyor belt carrying newspapers, courtesy of Turner Prize-nominated artist Goshka Macuga, was the star of Miu Miu’s heavy SS25 showcase at Paris Fashion Week.
Macuga’s installation was titled Salt looks like sugar and qualified in a statement from the haute couture house as a “constellation of elements to decipher the concept of truth and its representation”.
The print shop displayed issues of “The Truthless Times” on the venue’s walls as models, including actors Willem Dafoe and Hilary Swank, walked down the aisle dressed as the world’s most stylish office workers.
Subtle subversions of the mundane seemed to be the intention. There were modest knee-length dresses with loose windbreakers and tube tops tied around the torso like sweaters. There was also a backdrop that shouted its warning from beneath the water: “Endless endings as the future moves into the past.” A cynic’s opinion would be that the news, breaking and bloody as it is, deserves either a decisive comment – not likely at a fashion show – or to be left out of the conversation.
Warsaw-based Macuga makes large-scale sculptures, installations, collages (newspaper clippings feature prominently) and tapestries that weave in political messages—“mind maps,” as she calls them. Some of the most prominent works have taken their place as a subject. His 2010 Walker Art Center commission investigated the cultural impact of the institution itself.