Another brand making its Salone del Mobile debut this season was Miu Miu—and in a clever variation on the format employed by its big sister brand, Prada, they unveiled the Miu Miu Literary Club, a two-day program of panels and talks spotlighting the work of a pair of overlooked women authors. The venue couldn’t have been more Miu Miu if it tried: A few blocks over from the Duomo, the event took place in the Circolo Filologico Milanese, a 19th-century library and cultural club straight out of a Wes Anderson movie. At the talk I attended, curator and writer Lou Stoppard led a fascinating and genuinely moving panel with multiple-prize-winning authors Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, and Claudia Durastanti, in which they discussed Alba De Céspedes’s pioneering neorealist novel Forbidden Notebook, which acquired a new audience after being republished for the first time in 70 years by Pushkin Press last year.
Across their wide-ranging conversation—which involved Lahiri proudly showcasing a dog-eared paperback copy of one of De Céspedes’s novels she discovered while taking her regular Sunday walks through her local Roman market of Porta Portese, complete with a delightfully cheesy retro cover—the trio discussed everything from keeping diaries, to motherhood, to the paradox of male writers from Dante to Proust putting their inner emotional worlds on the page and being celebrated for it, while women working in a similar mode are sidelined as “confessional” writers. The assembled group of listeners—which included Zawe Ashton, Poppy Delevingne, and Ella Richards, all decked out in head-to-toe Miu Miu—were captivated, and when it came time for the talk to end you could have heard a pin drop. (Until, that is, the room quickly erupted into applause.) Afterwards, guests chatted over canapés and spritzes in the charming book-lined lounge space, with many already beginning to thumb through their provided copies of Forbidden Notebook. It was a brilliantly executed new facet of Miu Miu’s tradition of championing women creatives—see their Women’s Tales film program as another example—and an unexpected highlight of Milan Design Week. —L.H.