A conveyor belt carrying newspapers, courtesy of the Turner Prize–nominated artist Goshka Macuga, was the star of Miu Miu’s ponderous SS25 showcase at Paris Fashion Week.
Macuga’s installation was titled Salt Looks Like Sugar and described in a statement from the couture house as a “constellation of elements for deciphering the concept of truth and its representation.”
The printing press displayed issues of “The Truthless Times” on the venue’s walls as models, including actors Willem Dafoe and Hilary Swank, walked the aisle fitted like the world’s chicest office workers.
Subtle subversions of mundanity seemed to be the intention. There were modest knee-length dresses with loose windbreakers and tube(ish) tops tied around torsos like sweaters. There was also a backdrop that shouts its warning from underwater: “Endings Unending As Future Moves To Past.” A cynic’s take would be that the news, busted and bloody as it stays, deserves either decisive commentary—not likely in a fashion show—or to be left out of the conversation.
The Warsaw-based Macuga makes sculptures, installations, collages (newspaper clippings feature prominently in these), and large-scale tapestries that weave in political messages—“mind maps,” as she calls them. Some of the most high-profile works have taken their venue as subject. Her 2010 Walker Art Center commission investigated the cultural impact of the institution itself.
