Miu Miu Unveils Their Latest Women’s Tales Film With Joanna Hogg in London

Autobiografia di una Borsetta takes the perspective of an unconventional protagonist: a cream Miu Miu Wander bag that’s been given as a present to a young girl. Shot in the gorgeous Tuscan region of Maremma, Italy, the film makes the bag both a witness to and a prism of human experience—its curved handle a window on the world—as the Wander observes the girl’s coming-of-age and feels the tension of its own value and vulnerability as it changes hands.

Befitting Miu Miu’s bookish reputation, Hogg took inspiration from two texts for the project: James Fenimore Cooper’s Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (1843), a novel about the upper echelons of New York Society from the point of view of a woman’s handkerchief, and John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel’s forthcoming The Prop, which explores the importance of objects in movies. Rhodes and Gorfinkel were in the front rows of the cinema, as were the family we see onscreen, who waved enthusiastically when Hogg shouted them out. (The girls were also dressed in Miu Miu.)

“It’s struck me in new ways, seeing it here with you all tonight,” Hogg—wearing a chic, espresso suede Miu Miu skirt suit—told the crowd. She was in conversation with Gentlewoman editor-in-chief Penny Martin following the screening, discussing the inspirations and initial concepts behind the film.

Women’s Tales is a series of short films commissioned biannually. Now in its 15th year, it is committed to women in film telling women’s stories. Hogg, the first English director in the series, joins an impressive roster including Agnès Varda, Ava DuVernay, and Miranda July. Filmmakers work to an intentionally vague brief from Mrs. Muccia Prada: make a short film, using Miu Miu’s latest collectsion, that articulates a woman’s story.

“I didn’t want to make a short film that was something I would make anyway—I wanted to make something that got to the heart of Miu Miu…But at the same time, I realized my cinema, [my] fascinations with character, exploration of grief, those more serious subjects…They don’t contradict each other. And if they do, it’s interesting,” Hogg said.

Following the screening, guests caught Miu Miu cabs—or tottered the 10 minutes by foot—to Langan’s Brasserie. The London institution, once frequented by the likes of Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger, and Elton John, is adorned with polished brass and alabaster domes with a curved marble countertop. Here, more guests—including Ellie Bamber, Alisha Boe, Patricia Zhou, Emilia Jones, and Dafne Keen Fernández—explored the expanse of the restaurant, from the oyster bar to the top floor’s velvet booths and heated terrace. Attendees sipped more champagne, margaritas, and negronis and descended on trays of caviar blinis, dressed crab, lobster rolls, and mini meringues that circuited Langan’s three stories. In the opulent bathrooms, women admired each other’s co-ords and vintage accessories borrowed from Lover’s Lane Vintage, the treasure trove on Portobello Road.

Later, Hogg settles into a corner booth to tell Vogue more. We start with her storied protagonist: Why the Wander?

“It took a lot of thought—the color, more than the shape and style,” Hogg says. “I was drawn to the Wander bag without knowing its full iconography. It just seemed like a friendly bag. With the photographic eye, I saw through the handle. At first it was red, then orange and sunny yellow. I realized with white it could reflect. It’s not neutral, but it can be projected onto like a face. I wanted the bag a bit reserved too, I think.”

Voicing the bag is an older woman with a husky Tuscan timbre, which carries the whole way through its lifecycle onscreen. That wasn’t an immediate or obvious choice. “Even though I’d written the words, I didn’t know who would speak it,” Hogg shares. “I thought of Jean-Luc Godard at the end of his life and how he sounded, hearing the age and texture of a life through a voice. But I didn’t want a performance, I just wanted to hear a life in voice.” Hogg visited Lorenzo, a local hairdresser and musician with a good ear in the village where they were filming, and he knew who Hogg had to cast from his elderly clientele: Izetta Tollapi: “She’s not had an easy life herself. She is brilliant.”

The film delicately interweaves the capricious arcs of fashion and the contours of an older woman’s life. “[Aging] is a theme I’m really thinking deeply on for a piece I’m doing in the future,” Hogg says. “I’ve considered the cycle of an object in fashion, and what Miu Miu and Mrs. Prada are doing in terms of the reinvigoration of ideas in their new collectsions. I poured myself into the bag—it gave me great freedom with words that I wouldn’t have put into the mouth of a character. I channelled my own fears and anxieties about life.”

The film is vastly different in form from the rest of Hogg’s oeuvre—and that’s to say nothing of it being shot entirely in Italian. The scope and challenge were exciting, even inspiring, to her. “I really enjoyed the episodic nature of it, so I’m taking that into my next two short projects,” she says. “I loved exploring what a protagonist can do and be. Filming it myself was exciting and I’d love to exercise that again, as well as the more dynamic camera movement.”

Who would she like to see as the next Women’s Tales director? I ask. Hogg demures by reminiscing about what the late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman could have done with the task.

We wrap up our conversation late in the evening, as the music is cranked up louder and thickets of young women hover to get close to Hogg, who with each step across the room is enveloped in hug, after double-cheek kiss, after warm handshake. She makes the time for all their tales.