Tribute or cosplay? Aprons on the runway at Miu Miu

Dressing up like the lower class is a time-honored tradition for the rich, but the apron dresses that walked down the runway at Miu Miu was a step too far for many.

Miu Miu is a luxury fashion brand beloved by celebrities and the public alike, exemplified by the popularity of their 2022 khaki pleated micro-miniskirt and its various fast fashion dupes. Yet it seems their Spring/Summer 2026 collection fell flat for the everyday consumer. Comparing reviews on public forums and fashion magazines for the collection shows a divide. Elle Magazine described the aprons as “an act of defiance” against tradwives. Fashion website Who What Wear quoted Miu Miu founder Miuccia Prada saying the aprons are a “single garment containing multitudes”. Vogue Magazine anticipated the backlash with, “…Miuccia Prada is not oblivious to how her collection may stand as an illustration of the gulf between rich and poor that exists now…” and leaves it at that. These responses are a stark contrast to the early 2000s, where critics with columns prodded at designers and their choices. Fashion houses fought back, banning critics from shows. Over time it seems that houses have won the fight. With the rise of influencers dependent on cachet with brands for their careers, brands are not at the mercy of a critic that is more insulated from retaliation at a print magazine. Thus mainstream fashion criticism skews ever more adulatory under the threat of revoked access to shows, and therefore no material for influencer content. 

Some of the top comments in the subreddit r/whatthefrock, a popular fashion-related subreddit with over 412,000 users, are much more biting. User @thymiamatis said, “The belts and slacks are gorgeous, but the working-class butcher/mechanic/maid/cook/labourer cosplay is not it,” while @Summer_Sixtine said, “It feels… tone-deaf?” In the comments of Miu Miu’s recent instagram posts featuring the apron inspired pieces, such as this one, user @annina_vallarino writes, “Clearly the target is those who have never worked”, or under this one where @marghequ states “practically the maid who makes up the rooms in the hotel.”

Even in richer countries like the United States, the average consumer is not Miu Miu’s target audience, at least not for apparel. The aforementioned miniskirt cost at least $950 at the time. Yet even though the exact garments may never reach most people’s hands, they have a large influence on what many middle and lower class people wear. The cerulean sweater monologue from Miranda Priestly is a perfect summary of how this works.

Like any art, fashion is subjective. But why might there be such a divide between the critics and the public?

The main issue is not whether these clothes are “ugly”:  The head designer Miuccia Prada has built a career off of remixing clothing worn by secretaries, teachers and schoolgirls alike. Prada’s style of eccentric, sometimes even frumpy clothes is so celebrated that the Met included her designs for Prada in an exhibition with the theme “Ugly Chic”. In the book “Fashioning Identity”, Maria Mackinney-Valentin discusses how luxury brands may cash in on the “idea of the logic of wrong where being fashionably off is an ambiguous tactic of claiming status seen in the inversion of age in granny chic, novelty in vintage, and class in homeless chic”. In other words, this is another attempt to take inspiration from the “bottom” of the fashion pyramid by repackaging what normal people wear, and putting it at the top by presenting it in a luxury context. This happens often in the industry, but what makes this instance particularly galling are the pieces that don’t just take inspiration; they are wholesale copies of garments. It comes off grotesque, as much as the brand’s copy wants people to see it as tribute. The Miu Miu website states that this collection is a “consideration of the work of women – their challenges, adversity, experience. Its invisibility is confronted and addressed, recognized and valorized”. Yet it’s not all women, like the middle class occupations of teachers and secretaries she often pulls inspiration from. This collection specifically references the work of poor women, women most vulnerable not only to patriarchy but to poverty and racism. In the US, women of color make up over half of domestic workers. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous. This copy posits these garments as a form of activism, or at the very least progressive sentiment. Representation is good, right? But this situation cannot be directly compared to, for example, an effort to portray more Black people in mainstream movies. 

Instead, it is more a reflection of our desperate scramble for meaning and authenticity in such turbulent, incomprehensible times. Specifically, it’s meant to soothe Miu Miu’s wealthy audience, who are making even more money as the rest of us deal with a crumbling economy and policies punishing the poor. We want something we think is “real.” Miuccia Prada knows that. To address this want, she is giving us a distorted version of clothing people described as the salt of the earth would wear. As highminded as that copy is, and regardless of her self-described left-wing politics, she is part of two global brands with clothing, makeup and accessory lines. In a 2012 interview, she states, “Art is for expressing ideas and for expressing a vision. My job is to sell”. There is no appeal in this clothing for the women who actually work these jobs. Seeing it on the runway does not in fact address their invisibility, it commodifies it. It is a cruel joke for the garment workers, whose condition globally has not improved much since the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, to produce clothes that let the rich live out their blue collar fantasy while they themselves still struggle. 

Although Miu Miu and Prada boast that the majority of their factories are located in Italy, the supply chains for the fashion industry are often deliberately obscured. Subcontracting and outsourcing leads to conditions where exploitation is easier, a huge problem still even in Italy where conditions are seen as better for garment workers. Although Miu Miu and Prada were not among the Italian luxury brands that forced a worker’s strike for a 40 hour work week, they did recently have a scandal where the construction workers for a new SoHo location were being underpaid. This consideration for the working class is therefore mere lip service. The modern luxury fashion industry relies on mythmaking, on selling mystique to buyers when the materials and manufacturing are cheaper and sloppier every year, but to do so with a mirage of this collection being some sort of activism on behalf of poor women is galling.

On a broader scale, the US is facing massive layoffs, and worldwide income inequality is worsening. In Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”, he warns of a society where, “…everything is already dead and resurrected in advance. When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.” The situation for everyone not in the 1% is worsening, crushed underfoot by government policies meant to punish us. Yet this 1% want to play pretend as the very people whose lives they make miserable. These dresses are not a consideration of working people — they are an erasure.