What happens when fashion steps off the runway and into a movie? At Miu Miu's Tales &amp; Tellers in Shanghai, films come to life, stories unfold in real time, and getting wonderfully lost is part of the experience.

Some exhibitions ask visitors to look. Miu Miu's Tales &amp; Tellers asks them to wander, to listen, and to become part of the story.
Returning for its third international chapter, the immersive project arrived at Shanghai Exhibition Center from June 5 to 7, 2026, following its acclaimed debut at Paris' Palais d'Iéna during Art Basel Paris in 2024 and a reimagined presentation at New York's Terminal Warehouse in 2025. Yet Tales &amp; Tellers has never been designed to travel unchanged. Like the stories it celebrates, it evolves with every destination, taking on new meanings through the architecture, history and cultural rhythm of each city.

Envisioned by Miuccia Prada, conceived by interdisciplinary artist Goshka Macuga and convened by curator Elvira Dyangani Ose alongside theatre director Fabio Cherstich, the project exists somewhere between an exhibition, a theatrical performance and a cinematic dreamscape. Drawing from all 31 films in the celebrated Miu Miu Women's Tales series, alongside seven artistic interventions originally staged during the House's runway shows, it transforms moving images into living scenes in which performers quietly inhabit the characters, gestures, and emotions first captured on film.
Rather than retelling each narrative, the performers become its keepers. They drift through the space, repeating intimate rituals, crossing paths with one another, and occasionally creating entirely new conversations between stories that were never originally connected. Screens project the original films nearby, blurring the boundaries between memory and reality, performer and audience, fiction and lived experience. It is storytelling in perpetual motion, where no two journeys through the exhibition are quite the same.

Shanghai lends the project a particularly poetic new dimension. Housed inside the Shanghai Exhibition Center — an architectural landmark originally built in 1955 as the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building—the exhibition enters a building already layered with history and ideology. Designed by OMA/AMO, the installation responds to the venue rather than simply occupying it, allowing its grand halls, Soviet-inspired architecture and cultural legacy to shape how each story unfolds. Here, the city itself becomes another storyteller, offering a distinctly Chinese lens through which the narratives of women, identity and imagination are experienced.

At its heart, Tales &amp; Tellers celebrates women not only as protagonists, but as artists, filmmakers and custodians of collective memory. Fashion becomes costume, cinema becomes choreography, and contemporary art becomes a language through which stories continue to transform. It is a reminder that the most compelling narratives are never fixed—they are retold, reinterpreted and rediscovered with every new audience.
The opening night reflected the project's cultural significance, drawing an impressive gathering of Miu Miu ambassadors, friends of the House and rising creative voices. Among those in attendance were i-dle's Minnie, actors Zhao Jinmai and Liu Haocun, singer-actor Wang Yuan, alongside numerous figures from the worlds of film, music and fashion, underscoring Tales &amp; Tellers as one of the House's most anticipated cultural events of the year.

Miu Miu's Tales & Tellers weaves new stories in Shanghai

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