The fitting room at Miu Miu's Milan headquarters is smaller than you'd expect

The fitting room at Miu Miu's Milan headquarters is smaller than you'd expect. Max Tobias stands at the centre, sleeves rolled, adjusting a pleated skirt on a house model whose expression suggests she has been standing for forty minutes. The skirt sits low — not quite on the hip, not quite at the waist — and Tobias tugs the waistband down another centimetre, then steps back. He tilts his head. "Non," he says, and the fitter reaches for the pins.

This is the work. Not the runway image, not the campaign still, but this: a thirty-seven-year-old man in a grey sweatshirt, moving fabric a centimetre at a time until the proportions feel off-kilter in precisely the right way.

Tobias has been creative director of Miu Miu since January 2022. He is not a household name, which suits him. He does not give many interviews. He does not appear in the front row at other people's shows. What he does, with increasing confidence, is make clothes that feel both adolescent and arch — a combination that has turned Miu Miu into the most commercially buoyant maison in the Prada Group, and one of the few luxury houses where the waiting list for a nylon mini-skirt now stretches into double-digit weeks.

Formation

Tobias grew up in Antwerp, the son of a textile engineer and a high-school art teacher. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he was known, according to a former classmate, for his "obsessive" pattern-cutting and his habit of working through the night. He graduated in 2009, a year when fashion jobs were scarce, and spent eighteen months freelancing for a Belgian knitwear label whose name he has never publicly mentioned.

In 2011, he joined Prada as a junior designer in the womenswear atelier. It was not glamorous. He worked on linings, on sleeve construction, on the engineering of a coat's internal structure. He learned how a garment is built from the inside out, and how a house with Prada's resources approaches the question of finish. "You don't see the best work," he told System in 2023. "That's the point."

He stayed at Prada for six years, moving laterally through the studio rather than up. He worked on bags for a season, then returned to ready-to-wear. He was, by several accounts, good at solving problems — how to make a certain silhouette reproducible at scale, how to adapt a fabric so it would hold a pleat through cleaning. He was not, at that stage, known for vision.

Virage

The turn came in 2018, when Miuccia Prada tapped him to lead a small team tasked with reimagining Miu Miu's accessories line. The brief was loose: make the bags feel younger, but not teenage. Make them covetable, but not in the way a Prada bag is covetable. Tobias responded with a series of small, boxy shoulder bags in washed nylon and calf leather, priced just under €1,000, that looked like something a clever sixteen-year-old might carry to a museum. They sold out in three weeks.

Prada, who has a reputation for watching her designers closely and promoting rarely, moved him to ready-to-wear six months later. By 2020, he was de facto lead on Miu Miu's seasonal collections, though the title did not change. Prada remained the public face; Tobias worked in the background, refining what he would later describe as "the grammar of the house."

That grammar, under his hand, began to shift. Hemlines rose. Waistbands dropped. Proportions that had once felt playful now felt confrontational. A micro-mini worn with a cardigan two sizes too small; a blazer cropped to the ribs, paired with a pleated skirt that grazed mid-thigh. The silhouettes were not new — Prada herself had explored similar territory in the 1990s — but Tobias pushed them harder, and styled them with a kind of prim defiance that read, on the runway, as both innocent and knowing.

When he was formally named creative director in early 2022, the appointment was treated, in the trade press, as a footnote. Prada was still involved. Tobias was still largely unknown. The assumption was continuity.

Signature

What emerged instead was a tightening of focus. Tobias stripped the collections down to a smaller vocabulary: the micro-skirt, the cropped cardigan, the ballet flat, the oversized blazer worn with almost nothing underneath. He repeated these elements season after season, varying the fabric, the colour, the styling, but not the underlying proposition. The clothes looked like school uniform remixed by someone who had read Lolita and decided to argue back.

The effect was both immediate and polarising. Older critics found the proportions cartoonish. Younger buyers found them irresistible. By spring 2023, Miu Miu's ready-to-wear sales had increased forty-two per cent year-on-year, driven largely by skirts priced between €800 and €1,200. The house opened new boutiques in Seoul, Shanghai, and Los Angeles. Tobias, meanwhile, stayed out of sight.

His signature, such as it is, rests on a kind of tonal ambiguity. The clothes are girlish, but not sweet. They are revealing, but not overtly sexual. They suggest privilege — the fabrics are good, the construction irreproachable — but they also suggest rebellion, or at least the performance of rebellion. A Miu Miu skirt worn with a pair of loafers and knee socks reads differently depending on who is wearing it, and where, and Tobias seems content to let that tension sit unresolved.

He has also proved adept at collaboration. The autumn 2023 campaign featured the actress Greta Lee wearing a grey wool mini-suit in a series of stills that looked like outtakes from a Rohmer film. The spring 2024 show opened with a sixteen-year-old model in a pleated skirt and a men's dress shirt, walking to a Françoise Hardy track from 1966. These are not accidents. Tobias is building a world, and he is building it with references that feel both specific and open to interpretation.

What comes next

The question now, inevitably, is whether he can sustain it. Miu Miu's commercial success has made Tobias one of the most watched designers in Milan, and the house's next moves will be scrutinised accordingly. There is talk of expanding the menswear line, which currently accounts for less than ten per cent of revenue. There is talk of a standalone fragrance, though Tobias has so far resisted.

In the fitting room, he is still adjusting the skirt. The model shifts her weight. The fitter waits. Tobias steps back again, looks, and nods. "Oui," he says. The skirt will go into the collection as is — low, short, slightly wrong. The work continues.