From screen to site: How Miu Miu made its cultural assets come alive

What happened From Women’s Tales to Tales & Tellers, how has Miu Miu built women’s stories into a living cultural IP? And how can that IP move from the screen into real life, continuing to form new connections with audiences across different cities? Miu Miu brought Tales & Tellers to Shanghai from June 5 to 7, following editions in Paris and New York. Through its Shanghai edition, the brand transformed more than a decade of women’s stories into an immersive narrative site shaped by moving image, performance, dress, architecture and the audience itself. When stories leave the screen These stories draw from two strands of Miu Miu’s creative world: Women’s Tales, the film project launched in 2011, and the works created with seven female contemporary artists across the brand’s runway shows from Spring/Summer 2022 to Spring/Summer 2025. Thirty-one short films. Thirty-one female directors. Seven artists. Each uses Miu Miu clothing as a vehicle for character, mood and storytelling, exploring femininity, desire and self-perception. Distinct yet interconnected, they form a universe that is unmistakably Miu Miu. Faced with such a layered body of work, Miu Miu does not turn it into an exhibition that feels sophisticated only if it is difficult to decode. Instead, the brand gives visitors a clear way in. The exhibition guide in each visitor’s hands links specific characters from Women’s Tales with the figures, installations and performances unfolding on site. Even without a complete understanding of Miu Miu’s cultural output over the past decade, visitors can quickly grasp where a figure comes from, and what story she carries, through the guide or with help from staff. The films connected to each performer are also embedded into the site in different forms: some appear on screens, while others are hidden in props, mirrors or viewfinders. More compellingly, characters once scattered across separate films, along with performers tied to the art installations, are brought into the same live universe. Dressed in Miu Miu pieces from different years, they meet, watch and interact with one another, sometimes even entering each other’s stories: a photographer character may take pictures of a figure from another film; a character from one standalone narrative may step into another performer’s scene. In this way, Women’s Tales is no longer a set of separate short films. It is rewoven into a fluid network of relationships. At the same time, Miu Miu preserves a route back to the films themselves. When visitors become curious about a character, a film or an emotion, the screening space on the second floor offers the chance to watch the full works. Live performance becomes the entry point; clothing deepens the memory; the films allow the audience to return to the source. The project is therefore more than a brief brand check-in. It feels closer to an intimate, extended encounter with Miu Miu. Visitors can move among performances or sit in the screening room; they can be drawn to a character or find an emotional echo in a film — something that lingers after they leave. The Jing Take: A traveling theatre of womenss stories Tales & Tellers was originally conceived by Miuccia Prada, curated by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga, convened by curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, and developed in collaboration with opera and theatre director Fabio Cherstich. From the beginning, it was never a touring exhibition to be reproduced intact. It is a dynamic project, continually reshaped by city, architecture and cultural context. In October 2024, the project debuted at the Palais d’Iéna during Art Basel Paris. The Paris edition had the feel of a public forum for women’s stories. With its institutional presence and modernist monumentality, the Palais d’Iéna offered an open, luminous and ceremonial setting. A year later, it moved to New York’s Terminal Warehouse, where the atmosphere shifted sharply. The industrial space was rougher, darker, and marked by layered urban memory and a sense of mystery. Here, women’s stories no longer felt as though they were being told in a square. They seemed scattered through an urban maze, suspended between reality, imagination, performance and daily life. Yet across these changing settings, the project’s core remains constant. As Goshka Macuga told Jing Daily, Tales & Tellers continues to examine the role of women in shaping cultural narratives — not as fixed representations, but as active agents in an ongoing process of meaning-making, exploring the relationships between voice, identity and forms of representation. For the Shanghai edition, Miu Miu chose the Shanghai Exhibition Centre, placing the project in closer contact with the city’s public memory. Built in 1955 and originally named the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building, the venue has long hosted major exhibitions, public events and civic occasions in Shanghai. Its blend of Russian neoclassicism and socialist realism makes it not only a historic building, but part of the shared urban experience of generations of Shanghainese. In this sense, the Shanghai Exhibition Centre gives Miu Miu’s global women’s narrative a local frame rooted in public memory. It also allows the Shanghai edition to move beyond the logic of a conventional brand exhibition. The question is not simply how a brand arrives in China, but how a continuously evolving global cultural project can enter a local Chinese space and build a more specific, more tangible relationship with its audience. When cultural assets enter circulation Miu Miu can do this because it has spent more than a decade cultivating Women’s Tales. When the brand launched the film project in 2011, it likely did not already have this large-scale live performance format in mind. Rather, it began as a long-term, open-ended brand commitment: to continuously invite female directors to tell women’s stories through their own eyes. Because of that sustained investment, Women’s Tales is no longer just a series of short films. It has become a narrative system made of women creators, characters, visual language, sartorial memory and emotional experience. Tales & Tellers is the live evolution of that long accumulation: it brings Women’s Tales from the screen into physical space, turning stories once held in film into experiences that can be entered, felt and reinterpreted. For the brand, this is not merely a change of format. It is a reorganisation of cultural assets. More importantly, Tales & Tellers turns Women’s Tales from a long-running film initiative known within the industry into a cultural entry point that audiences actively want to step into. In the past, it may have been understood largely as Miu Miu’s film series supporting women directors and women’s stories. At the Shanghai site, however, these films are no longer archival works. They become narrative threads to be watched, recognised, interacted with and traced further. Characters from the films step off the screen and into real space, forming relationships with audiences, architecture and the city. They gain bodies, voices, movement and live emotion, allowing Miu Miu’s cultural assets, built over more than a decade, to become more than something revisited. They become alive in the room. This is what sets Miu Miu apart. It has not built a cultural concept overnight. It has returned to the same subject for more than a decade, quietly accumulating enough material, feeling and depth. With Tales & Tellers, that archive is no longer simply an asset held by the brand. It becomes an experience that can be entered, felt and shared. That shift matters in China. Chinese consumers do not lack brand exhibitions, nor do they lack immersive experiences. Quite the opposite: they have seen many, and they increasingly understand that a show built only on scale, visual impact and photogenic installations can quickly be replaced by the next larger spectacle. What cuts through that fatigue is whether a brand has long-term content behind it — and whether it can turn that content into an experience audiences are willing to stay with, understand and carry away. This is where Miu Miu’s strength lies. It does not rely on a single large-scale exhibition to prove its cultural position. Instead, it lays out, recomposes and opens up more than a decade of women’s stories for audiences to enter again. For luxury brands, the real moat lies in this ability to turn long-term cultural accumulation into live experiences that audiences can enter, feel and remember. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

From screen to site: How Miu Miu made its cultural assets come alive

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From screen to site: How Miu Miu made its cultural assets come alive

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