The popular statement among the fashion crowd this season is Miu Miu's Celia Birtwell-inspired prints from the current collection. Fashion editors descended on Milan's Miu Miu store to snap up the whimsical silk print blouses and dresses proving how practical and easy Miu Miu is to wear.
Next spring they will pounce on the Victorian embroidered cotton blouses and the voluminous gypsy skirts with their patterned hems which were on the catwalk on Monday night.
The new collection was a fusion of Victorian and Eastern European themes. Doll-like dresses with bell sleeves and frilled necklines, pintucked blouses primly buttoned-up and tucked into long hobble skirts had the look of the Victorian schoolroom. In Miuccia Prada's hands the Victorian theme has a fresh child-like innocence, even the crisp cotton lace nightshirts look as though they have emerged from the nursery rather than the boudoir. Miuccia is too much of a modernist to succumb to the sexpot school of Italian fashion, although the tiny, lacy petal-hemmed ra-ra skirts were a surprise albeit teamed with schoolgirl knits.
The fine-gauge knitwear and gypsy dirndl skirts echo an Eastern European look: heavy bell-shaped skirts with folkloric floral prints in a range of warm colours including bilberry, navy, grey, willow and a lovely dusky pink.
Worlds away were the psychedelic prints and zig-zagging patterns of Missoni's knitwear. The family-owned Italian knitwear label, now designed by Tai and Rosita Missoni's daughter Angela, returned to their hippy roots with great swirling oil-slick print dresses in brown, lime and tangerine; palazzo pants and batwing tops in psychedelic lime and turquoise, or a buttock-skimming tunic in searing orange and turquoise. The Missoni's were always vivid colourists, but for summer it has been translated into print, although there were a few flamboyant zig-zag or peg-patterned trousers and dresses in cotton and metallic yarns run up on the knitting machine.