Miu Miu's latest (unruly) fairy tale speaks the language of Mona Fastvold A new chapter in the brand's film project, exploring fashion, vulnerability, and auteur vision

There are projects that don’t age because they keep changing their skin. Miu Miu Women’s Tales is one of them. For over fifteen years now (and with almost thirty short films behind it), the series has continued to function as a living laboratory of women’s cinema, a space where fashion stops being a frame and becomes a language. Now it’s Mona Fastvold’s turn. And it makes perfect sense. An Oscar-nominated director and the author of a physical, restless, emotionally rigorous cinema, Fastvold signs Discipline, the 31st chapter of Miu Miu Women’s Tales. A film that, starting from its title, promises to dismantle the very idea of control, form, and identity—and that wears Miu Miu the way one wears emotional armor.

Women’s Tales doesn’t tell stories, it builds worlds

Born in 2011 from Miuccia Prada’s very clear vision, Miu Miu Women’s Tales has never been “just” a film series. It is an emotional archive of contemporary femininity, a constellation of worlds built by women directors who were given something increasingly rare: total trust. No imposed themes. No prepackaged morals. Just the implicit request to use cinema to question (and question oneself about) what it means to be a woman today. The result is a constellation of films that differ in tone, form, and rhythm, yet are united by a shared intention: to explore contemporary femininity as something unstable, contradictory, and in constant transformation. Within this ecosystem, Miu Miu garments are not objects to be displayed. They are silent characters, accomplices to the story, capable of amplifying fragilities, desires, and fears. They are symbolic bodies, sometimes refuge, sometimes friction. Often both. It is the most coherent extension of Miuccia Prada’s thinking, who for over thirty years has used fashion as a critical tool. Not to define women, but to multiply their images.

Discipline: clothing as emotional armor

Discipline is born from a personal experience. Fastvold starts from the precise memory of a Miu Miu garment worn during a moment of intense anxiety, a context that leaves the body exposed, vulnerable. And suddenly the garment becomes protection. Structure. Armor. From this comes a short film built with life-sized puppets, choreographed movements, repeated gestures. A visual grammar that speaks of formation, incompleteness, visibility. The protagonist moves forward into the world. She is finally seen. But she is not yet “finished.” And it is precisely there that the film stops, in the unstable space between who we are and who we are becoming. The result is a short film that works through subtraction and estrangement, where discipline is not imposition but a fallible, human attempt to hold oneself together. Here, clothing becomes protection, structure, language. It does not decorate, it sustains.

Mona Fastvold: a voice that doesn’t ask permission

Norwegian by origin and New Yorker by choice, Mona Fastvold is one of the most coherent auteurs in contemporary cinema. She co-wrote The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux, and The Brutalist with Brady Corbet, a collaboration that earned them an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. As a director, she made The World to Come, winner of the Queer Lion, and The Testament of Ann Lee, a historical musical starring Amanda Seyfried. These films share the same obsession with the body as a political, emotional, and spiritual site. For this reason, Fastvold’s entry into the world of Miu Miu Women’s Tales, which will officially take place on February 12, 2026, with the New York premiere of Discipline at Village East by Angelika, feels perfectly natural.