Minnie, Zhao Jinmai And Other Stars Celebrated Women’s Stories At Miu Miu Tales & Tellers In Shanghai
Using the 31 films from the Miu Miu Women’s Tales series as inspiration, the third iteration of the project continues to blur the lines between cinema, fashion, and performance art.
By Annabelle Fernandez - published
There’s a certain kind of magic when women come together—a powerful alchemy of camaraderie, community and mutual understanding. It can happen anywhere: in a powder room, at a stand-up show, or on the dance floor. That feeling is captured, explored and distilled at Miu Miu Tales & Tellers, a performance project imagined by Miuccia Prada; and brought to life by multi-disciplinary artist Goshka Macuga, curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, and theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich.
First launched as part of Art Basel Paris in 2024, before heading to New York in 2025, Miu Miu Tales & Tellers recently landed in Shanghai. Within the cavernous halls of the Shanghai Exhibition Center, the third iteration of the project was unveiled at a vernissage on 5 June, before opening to the public on 6 to 7 June.
From left to right: Minnie, Zhao Jinmai, Lexie Liu
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Guests at the vernissage included brand ambassador Minnie of i-dle; actresses Zhao Jinmai, Li Gengxi, and Liu Haocun; singers Lexie Liu and Sdanny Lee; as well as directors Zou Jing and Tan Chui Mui. Malaysian filmmaker Tan directed the short film I am the Beauty of your Beauty, I am the Fear of Your Fear, the twenty-seventh commission from Miu Miu Women’s Tales, starring Sdanny Lee, Jean Seizure and Jo Kukathas.
Since its launch in 2011 with Audrey by Zoe Cassevetes, Miu Miu Women’s Tales has grown to an anthology of 31-and-counting female-led films exploring the plurality of womanhood and celebrating femininity. This series served as the source material for Miu Miu Tales and Tellers; alongside the artistic interventions staged at the brand’s shows from spring/summer 2022 to spring/summer 2025.
Described as “an intersection of film, fashion and contemporary art”, Macuga and her collaborators extracted characters from the films and interventions, a process that involved them casting lookalike performers who could embody the roles in a convincing manner—dressed in clothes from Miu Miu’s archives, of course, and performing selected excerpts from the films.
Goshka Macuga and Fabio Cherstich
Speaking to members of the press at a preview, Macuga said, “I decided to extract individual characters from the movies to, in a way, free them and bring them to life; where the public can interact with the characters, and create much more complex relationships with women. They become groups, communities; all of this illustrating these possibilities of enhancing or liberating women, or somehow giving them strength to become powerful.”
The Host (foreground), The Boy (background)
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As visitors roamed the hall in a free-form manner, they encountered each of these characters; not simply portraying scenes from their respective films, but also engaging and interacting with the other characters. We witnessed Gita (from I am the Beauty of your Beauty, I am the Fear of Your Fear), The Chrysalid (from The Chrysalid by Lucrecia Martel) and The Host (from (The [End) of History Illusion] by Celia Rowlson-Hall) become part of the audience that formed around Carmen (from Carmen by Chloë Sevigny) as she performed a stand-up routine dressed in a bright red dress from spring/summer 2017, laughing along with the rest of us at her droll observations (“It’s adorable when married couples go on date night”, she quipped).
Rachelle (foreground), The Chrysalid (background)
As the characters become part of the crowd, it became difficult to differentiate between who was playing a role, and who was simply a member of the audience. We made way as Rachelle (from That One Day by Crystal Moselle) whizzed by on her skateboard, looking like a picture of youthful innocence in a white dress and yellow cardigan from fall/winter 2016.
Girlhood
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We looked on as the intertwined figures named Girlhood (from Discipline by Mona Fastvold) performed a ritualistic dance; a faceless doll wearing a blue poplin dress and ballet flats from spring/summer 2026, controlled by a masked puppeteer.
The location, too, became a character in and of itself. Built in 1955, the Shanghai Exhibition Centre features neoclassical architecture and is one of the city’s most iconic landmarks. The event takes place in the expansive main hall, which is flanked by flights of stairs on both ends. Said Cherstich, “After we focused on the action for each of the characters, and the relationship between the single character, the audience, and the device, we started to think about what does it mean today to have a community of women sharing a common space? In this specific case, because of the architecture of the building, we saw the stairs, and Goshka immediately thought, okay, we need to stage something on the stairs, and we will need to give voice to one of the characters.”
The result? A finale that sees the characters slowly make their way as a group to the bottom of the stairs, as The Observer (from Fragments for Venus by Alice Diop) stands in the middle, slowly and steadily reciting from her script, including a segment inspired by American civil rights activist Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival”. “When we are loved, we are afraid. When we are alone, we are afraid. When we are silent, we are still afraid. So, she said, it is better to speak. Remember: we were never meant to survive,” she read, as the rest of the cast assembled around her.
The finale was one of two acts in the project that saw the women coming together en masse, the other instance being when The Performer (from Le Donne Della Vucciria by Hiam Abbass) started singing, and all the other characters began to gather around her. One by one, they started dancing; slowly at first, and as the music gained tempo, so did they—clapping, cheering, arms in the air, all these different characters coming together as one entity to simply let loose and be free, gaining strength from being part of a community. That sense of empowerment and freedom was transferred onto those of us watching them too; the idea that together, we can do anything, and nothing can stop us.
In both of those moments, one thing became clear. Tales & Tellers is by women, about women. We went in as individuals, each with our own tales to tell, but within those walls, we became part of a community; a reminder of the power that comes from a woman meeting other women, and the collective tales we tell.