Alexander Fury: The everyday can be extraordinary in fashion

Miu Miu's winter poster-collection is the example that context is everything

Miu Miu winter poster-collection

As much as you curl your lip and try to be aloof, fashion sucks you in. I work in fashion because I love it, which is why I get a flush of excitement and itchy feet the moment that the trickle of autumn/winter collections into shops becomes a flood.

That’s getting earlier and earlier each season, hence the fact I was sweating in Miu Miu last week, clad in rose-tinted PVC and nylon.

That doesn’t sound like anything to get hot under the collar about – unless we’re talking literally (the temperature outside was in the early twenties, my armpits were sub-tropical).

I’ve written about avant-bland, Normcore, and fashion’s current predilection for the dull. There’s something about normal that looks new right now. Winter Miu Miu is the perfect poster-collection.

10 magazine have shot an editorial for their autumn issue which ideally illustrates my point. It’s photographed by the artist Jeff Burton, whose most famous works focus on the banal suburban normality that frequently acts as the background to pornographic films. He captures Miu Miu reflected in car doors, or blurry in the middle-distance, images that end up looking distinctly… un-fashion. Plain, but interesting.

Fashion's avant-bland: The new everyday aesthetic is far from banal

Which is the point of this collection. Walk into any Miu Miu shop and you’re struck by the ordinariness of the clothes. You’re also arrested by their juxtaposition against the lush interiors. There’s something jolting about the context. And context is everything in fashion.