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The Miu Miu store on 57th Street has been a long time coming. The brand secured the space formerly occupied by Jil Sander more than two years ago, and has been postponing its opening for the past three months. Then—wouldn't you know—it was rainy on the big night itself. "Not that that could discourage me," Peaches Geldof said. "I would wait another year and go through a blizzard for Miu Miu."

Miuccia Prada was a no-show, but the party drew plenty of fashionable faces, including Claire Danes, Ciara, and Sasha Pivovarova. Hana Soukupova, a model who knows her Stevens from her Marios, was impressed with the trip through fashion history provided by the silk-screened campaigns lining the store's walls (they take the viewer from Chloë Sevigny's teenage turn to more recent subjects like Kirsten Dunst). But by the end of the affair, thoughts went back to the rotten weather. "Do you think they'll notice if I take this coat on the way out?" asked Jen Brill, in a black leather Miu Miu party dress. The answer, provided by a security guard, was a chilly yes.

MILAN, September 23, 2008

By Sarah Mower

Miuccia Prada had a sound bite for her Spring collection. "It's primitive," she said, "going back to what counts." And what counts most in a back-to-basics time, when most of us will need truly visceral temptation to get us out and shopping? Why, glamour and eroticism, of course. When the chips are down, there is no one who can turn up the thermostat of subversive sexual provocation quite as high as Mrs. Prada. Her girls, their skin glistening as if on a fevered summer's night, might have been passing through on their way to or from lovers' assignations, their clothes disarranged in various states of falling-off, or looking as if they might do so at any moment. Rumpled and crinkled fabrics have been appearing all over this season, but never with such sly intent. One pull of a trailing drawstring tape and, whoops! A person could find herself half naked. Not that this collection is, of course, at all brassy. From some angles, it can all look like a perfectly innocent summery dishevelment—that is, until there's a glimpse into an open-sided dress, or a cashmere sweater turns to display hospital-tape ties holding the back together (or just about).

There was something fabulously Italian about all this shameless reveling in femininity. The fifties overtones, with the high chignons, the ruched bras, and swishing rear-action in the below-knee pencil skirts managed to channel the heyday of Cinecitta without cliché. Best of all, this is a collection destined to look even better on a woman with a real body than it does on a teen model. And that, Mrs. Prada surely knows, really is "what counts."