A jazz night at the Ginza flagship. A rail of old cotton shirts cut into something new. Suki Waterhouse in front of the lens.
Miu Miu showed the latest chapter of its Upcycled project in Tokyo on 13 May, during a Miu Miu Jazz Club evening at the Ginza flagship store. The campaign came after, photographed by Alasdair McLellan with Suki Waterhouse. Miuccia Prada designed the line. Lotta Volkova styled it and Christopher Simmonds handled the art direction.
Upcycled is not new for the house. Miu Miu has run the project since 2020, buying vintage garments and remaking each one into a single piece that exists only once. This year the source material is plain: white cotton shirts and khaki chinos, gathered from vintage dealers around the world.
The method
The trousers get taken apart and rebuilt. Chinos become jackets, bustiers, skirts. Shirts are reshaped into dresses and reworked separates. The cuts are deliberate, the seams moved off where you would expect to find them.
What stays is the wear. Distressed finishes are left visible rather than cleaned away. Over that, the house adds crystal embroidery, ribbon, embellished patchwork. A worn collar sits next to a line of crystals. The contrast is the point.
Upcycled 2026, photographed by Alasdair McLellan · Courtesy of Miu Miu / Prada Group
The campaign
McLellan keeps the backdrops bare. Waterhouse stands against plain ground, the clothes carrying the frame. There is no set to read, only the garment and the light on it. The pictures sit close to portraiture.
Volkova styles the remade pieces alongside Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2026, so the one-off garments share the rail with the season’s production clothes. The effect pulls the project out of the archive and into the current wardrobe. The vintage shirt and the new skirt read as one outfit.
Each piece carries the wear of an earlier life. Miu Miu leaves the evidence in.
The Splendid EditGinza
The launch ran through the Miu Miu Jazz Club, the house’s recurring music format, staged this time at the Ginza store in Tokyo. The setting put the collection in front of a Japanese audience first, in a city where Miu Miu’s following runs deep. The flagship doubled as the room and the backdrop.
The context
Upcycled sits inside Miu Miu’s broader work on circularity, and it has become one of the more legible parts of that effort. The single-piece model resists scale by design. Each garment is one of one, which makes the project a statement as much as a product line.
It also lands in a strong year for the house. Miu Miu has been the growth engine of Prada Group across the last several seasons, and the brand has used that momentum to push past clothes that simply sell. The Upcycled run is where it spends some of that capital on craft.
The shirt has been worn before. That is the part Miu Miu wants kept. A line of crystals across an old cotton placket, a chino seam moved to the waist of a skirt. The clothes hold two lives at once.
Miu Miu Upcycled 2026 collection and campaign released by Milan-based Miuccia Prada and Prada Group, following a launch at the Ginza flagship in Tokyo on 13 May 2026. Each piece is one of a kind, available at miumiu.com and at the brand’s boutiques.
Photography by Alasdair McLellan, courtesy of Miu Miu / Prada Group · Miu Miu Upcycled 2026