One other model making its Salone del Cell debut this season was Miu Miu—and in a intelligent variation on the format employed by its massive sister model, Prada, they unveiled the Miu Miu Literary Membership, a two-day program of panels and talks spotlighting the work of a pair of ignored ladies authors. The venue couldn’t have been extra Miu Miu if it tried: Just a few blocks over from the Duomo, the occasion happened within the Circolo Filologico Milanese, a Nineteenth-century library and cultural membership straight out of a Wes Anderson film. On the speak I attended, curator and author Lou Stoppard led an enchanting and genuinely shifting panel with multiple-prize-winning authors Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, and Claudia Durastanti, wherein they mentioned Alba De Céspedes’s pioneering neorealist novel Forbidden Pocket book, which acquired a brand new viewers after being republished for the primary time in 70 years by Pushkin Press final yr.
Throughout their wide-ranging dialog—which concerned Lahiri proudly showcasing a dog-eared paperback copy of certainly one of De Céspedes’s novels she found whereas taking her common Sunday walks by means of her native Roman market of Porta Portese, full with a delightfully tacky retro cowl—the trio mentioned every part from maintaining diaries, to motherhood, to the paradox of male writers from Dante to Proust placing their interior emotional worlds on the web page and being celebrated for it, whereas ladies working in the same mode are sidelined as “confessional” writers. The assembled group of listeners—which included Zawe Ashton, Poppy Delevingne, and Ella Richards, all decked out in head-to-toe Miu Miu—had been captivated, and when it got here time for the speak to finish you possibly can have heard a pin drop. (Till, that’s, the room shortly erupted into applause.) Afterwards, company chatted over canapés and spritzes within the charming book-lined lounge house, with many already starting to thumb by means of their offered copies of Forbidden Pocket book. It was a brilliantly executed new aspect of Miu Miu’s custom of championing ladies creatives—see their Girls’s Tales movie program as one other instance—and an surprising spotlight of Milan Design Week. —L.H.
