Miu Miu : les artisans qui font le travail

The fitting room at Miu Miu's Milan headquarters, third floor, overlooks a courtyard where delivery vans idle and couriers smoke. Inside, a seamstress named Carla Bianchi is pinning a pleated mini-skirt — the one from the spring/summer 2022 collection, the one that sold out in four colourways before it ever hit the sales floor. She doesn't look up when the press officer enters. Her hands move in small, precise gestures: fold, pin, check the fall. The skirt is wool gabardine, lightweight but structured, and the pleats must hold their memory without stiffening the drape. Bianchi has been doing this for twenty-three years.

You won't find her name in the show notes.

Miu Miu, like most houses operating at this scale, doesn't credit its atelier staff in public-facing materials. The narrative centres on Miuccia Prada, as it should — she is the creative director, the vision, the name above the door. But between her sketch and the garment that walks the runway lies a network of specialised hands, many of whom have spent decades perfecting a single skill: setting a sleeve, constructing a collar that stands without interfacing, or — in Bianchi's case — engineering pleats that behave.

The atelier structure

Miu Miu's production is split between its Milan atelier and a constellation of external workshops, primarily in Veneto and Tuscany. The internal team handles prototyping and high-complexity pieces: anything involving hand-finishing, intricate construction, or experimental fabrication. External ateliers take on volume production, working to specifications developed in-house. It's a model most Italian maisons use, though few discuss it in detail.

The Milan atelier employs roughly forty full-time artisans. They work in specialised teams: one for tailoring, another for knitwear, a third for what the industry calls flou — soft, unstructured garments that require a different technical vocabulary. Bianchi sits within the tailoring group, though her work often crosses into flou when a piece demands both precision and movement.

Her route into the trade was standard for her generation. At sixteen, she enrolled in a technical school in Bergamo that offered a three-year programme in pattern-making and garment construction. After graduation, she worked for a small atelier in Milan that supplied samples to mid-tier brands. The pay was modest, the hours long, the work repetitive. She stayed for five years, then moved to Prada's main line in 1998. Two years later, when Miu Miu expanded its internal production capacity, she transferred.

"People think it's glamorous," she told Il Sole 24 Ore in a rare 2019 interview. "It's not. It's problem-solving with fabric."

The pleated skirt

The skirt in question — style number MU1406, though that designation means nothing outside the company's internal systems — became what the trade calls a phénomène in early 2022. It appeared on TikTok, then Instagram, then in the windows of every multi-brand retailer from Paris to Seoul. Miu Miu produced it in six fabrications: wool gabardine, cotton poplin, denim, leather, satin, and a technical nylon. The pleats were consistent across all versions, which meant six different approaches to achieving the same visual result.

Bianchi's team developed the gabardine version first. The fabric, sourced from Tessuti di Sondrio, a mill in Lombardy, weighs 240 grams per square metre — heavy enough to hold a crease, light enough to move. The pleats are knife pleats, each one heat-set after construction. The process requires a steam press calibrated to 160 degrees Celsius, applied for exactly twelve seconds per section. Too hot, and the wool scorches. Too cool, and the pleat relaxes within a week.

Setting the pleats is Bianchi's work. Calculating their width, depth, and placement belongs to the pattern-maker, a man named Luca Moretti who has worked at Miu Miu since 2005. He doesn't sketch. He drapes, working directly on a dress form with muslin, pinning and adjusting until the proportions satisfy him. Once the muslin is finalised, he translates it into a paper pattern, which then goes to Bianchi for the first fabric prototype.

For the gabardine skirt, Moretti and Bianchi went through four iterations before arriving at the version that went into production. The first was too stiff. The second lost its shape after a day of wear. The third worked, but the waistband sat awkwardly — a problem traced back to the placement of the zipper, which Moretti repositioned by half a centimetre. The fourth version passed muster.

Miuccia Prada saw all four. She approved the final sample in a fitting that lasted, according to those present, less than three minutes.

The leather version

Leather pleats don't behave like wool pleats. The material has no memory. It won't hold a crease through heat-setting alone, which meant Moretti's pattern needed rethinking. The solution came from an external atelier in Scandicci, a town outside Florence known for its leather workshops. The atelier, Pelletteria Fiorentina, has supplied Miu Miu since 2011.

The head of their pleating department, a woman named Alessandra Conti, proposed a hybrid approach: score the leather along the pleat lines with a heated blade, then back each pleat with a thin strip of canvas to hold the fold. The canvas is invisible from the outside, but it gives the leather structure without adding bulk. Conti's team produced a sample within a week. Prada approved it without revision.

Conti trained at her family's workshop, which her grandfather founded in 1952. She joined Pelletteria Fiorentina in 2003, after the family business closed. Her work isn't limited to Miu Miu — she also handles projects for Bottega Veneta, Loewe, and several smaller labels — but Miu Miu, she said in a 2021 profile in Vogue Italia, offers the most interesting technical challenges.

"They don't ask for the expected solution," she said. "They want the solution that hasn't been tried yet."

What this labour costs

Bianchi earns approximately €38,000 per year, according to salary data published by the Italian textile workers' union. Moretti, as a senior pattern-maker, likely earns closer to €50,000. Conti's rate is harder to pin down — external ateliers bill by the project, not the hour — but industry estimates suggest Pelletteria Fiorentina charged between €15,000 and €20,000 for the development and initial production run of the leather skirt.

The skirt retailed for €1,200 in gabardine, €2,400 in leather.

One can debate the markup, and many do. But the equation isn't as simple as labour cost versus retail price. Between Bianchi's hands and the customer's wardrobe lies a supply chain that includes fabric mills, hardware suppliers, quality control, distribution, marketing, and the operational overhead of running a fashion house. Miu Miu doesn't publish its margin breakdowns, but industry analysts estimate that direct production costs — materials and labour combined — account for roughly twenty to thirty per cent of the retail price on a piece like this.

The rest funds the system that makes a Miu Miu skirt recognisable as a Miu Miu skirt.

The next piece

Bianchi is currently working on a coat for the autumn/winter 2024 collection. It's double-faced cashmere, unlined, with a collar that Moretti has redesigned three times. She won't say more — the collection hasn't shown yet, and the press office doesn't allow atelier staff to discuss unreleased work in detail. But she'll be in the fitting room when Prada reviews it, pins in hand, ready to adjust the fall of the collar by a millimetre or two if required.

Her name won't appear in the show notes for that collection, either. Whether that matters is a question the industry has started asking more loudly in recent years, as conversations around craft and authorship gain traction. Some houses — Hermès, notably — have begun crediting their artisans in certain contexts, though never on the runway. Others resist, arguing that fashion is a collaborative art and that singling out individuals distorts the collective effort.

Bianchi, for her part, doesn't seem troubled by the omission. "I know what I made," she said in that 2019 interview. "The people who need to know, know."

One suspects that's enough.