Ava DuVernay, Chloë Sevigny, and More Join Miu Miu to Celebrate Women Filmmakers

On the eve of Art Basel Paris, around 80 performers dressed in Miu Miu filled the Palais d’Iéna, the expansive Art Deco building currently home to the French Economic, Social, and Environmental Council—and each Paris Fashion Week, the brand’s prêt-à-porter shows. This time, though, the actors and models were there for “Tales & Tellers,” an immersive exhibition celebrating women in film.

For the exposition, Miuccia Prada tasked Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona director Elvira Dyangani Ose and Polish multidisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga with creating performance pieces and conversation panels inspired by 28 short films from Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series. They delivered, staging thought-provoking live vignettes from each short to mark the Italian luxury label’s first outing as the Art Basel Paris Public Program’s official partner. The initiative, which launched in 2011, gives female directors—past participants include Janicza Bravo, Haifaa Al-Mansour, Miranda July, Chloë Sevigny, and Ava DuVernay—free rein to create short films with costumes by Miu Miu, which then premiere during industry events like New York Fashion Week.

“I am interested by the notion of bringing different conversations into the world of fashion, of engaging with different creative spheres, enriching each other,” Prada told Vanity Fair. “It mirrors the exchanges and communications of life. This project is another expansion, shifting between different mediums. And always exploring deep and fundamental thoughts of what it means to be a woman today.”

The support of Prada and Miu Miu remains alarmingly necessary. A 2024 report, “Inclusion in the Director’s Chair,” found a striking lack of women directors in Hollywood: Out of 116 directors surveyed in 2023, only 12% were women. When looking back at its 17-year history surveying 1,769 directors, the report notes the percentage shrunk to 6%. In 2022 just 9% of domestic film directors were female.

DuVernay understands these challenges firsthand. Her film Middle of Nowhere, which traces the gripping story of a Black woman who drops out of medical school to dedicate her time to her incarcerated spouse, was a hit with jurors when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. They named DuVernay the winner of the US Directing Award: Dramatic, making her the first Black woman to garner the accolade.

“I thought the world was going to open up for me to Hollywood,” DuVernay recounts in tailored navy Miu Miu trousers and a red knit Miu Miu top a dozen years later. “I thought that I would have offers, films, that people would want to work with me in the industry—and none of that happened.”

Soon after, she directed The Door (2013) as part of Women’s Tales. “All I heard was, ‘We’ll give you a budget to make a movie,’ ” she recalled. “That was a hugely transformative moment for me, at a time when traditional Hollywood was not inviting me to make things, that this fashion house saw something in my work and wanted to offer me that.”

Her Women’s Tales film, The Door—starring Gabrielle Union as the protagonist going through a breakup as her friends cheer her up with Miu Miu outfits before she walks confidently through the door into the next chapter of her life—debuted in February 2013.

DuVernay—who was named to the Miu Miu Women’s Tales Committee in September 2023 during the Venice Film Festival, along with actor and director Maggie Gyllenhaal, Oscar-winning costume and production designer Catherine Martin, and cofounding committee members Miuccia Prada and Verde Visconti—returned the favor, suggesting Korean American filmmaker So Yong Kim. She created Spark and Light, starring Riley Keough and Laufey Elíasdóttir for Women’s Tales #7. “It’s such a great opportunity in many ways, because the sense of having the support and also creative freedom to tell a story in any way you want to gives you so much, like, latitude and creative control,” she tells me during the exhibition’s vernissage as Zola director Janicza Bravo’s House Comes With a Bird, Women’s Tales #23, featuring Natasha Lyonne and Pedro Pascal, plays on a screen across the room.

“The clothing is the actor,” explains Bravo, who worked as a costume designer before transitioning to directing. “It’s their DNA. It’s their second skin. Ideally, a character walks into a room and you should be able to telegraph something about them before they’ve even spoken, yeah, and clothing is the first opportunity to be able to do that.”

After the vernissage, guests made their way to Maxim’s de Paris, the storied Art Nouveau restaurant once frequented by Jean Cocteau, Josephine Baker, and Salvador Dalí, to celebrate over a dinner of smoked potatoes with red shrimp and ponzu hollandaise, and black cod with lemon verbena sauce. Al-Mansour, who sat across from me with her 14-year-old daughter, who acted in Women’s Tales #16’s The Wedding Singer’s Daughter, in tow. “It’s like bringing the character back to life, something beyond the movie,” she tells me in between bites. “It’s nice.”

The evening was followed by two days of panels and conversations with women in film at the locus. “I thought it could also help if people say, ‘They hired her after hiring Miranda July or Agnès Varda, or so many filmmakers,’ that it could only benefit me to be a part of that lineage,” explains Sevigny, who directed Carmen, Women’s Tales #13, after her panel discussion. “Every experience you have, you can learn more and more about what you might want to know for the future in order to make something dramatic, or to have tension.”

DuVernay hopes that Women’s Tales will continue to transform careers, and increase the number of films from 28 to 50 in the next decade. “I don’t think enough people outside of the Miu Miu world know it. More people need to understand, know these films,” says DuVernay. “The hope is that we, as the committee and with the team at Prada and Miu Miu, can grow its reach, because I think it’s inspiring, galvanizing, activating, and so it’s an extraordinary program we want more people to know about, and we want it to continue.”