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The Secret Life of a Handbag: Joanna Hogg’s Mesmerizing Ode to Memory and Materiality

The Secret Life of a Handbag: Joanna Hogg’s Mesmerizing Ode to Memory and Materiality February 16, 2025Italy, News0 Comments

MIU MIU WOMEN’S TALES #29 – AUTOBIOGRAFIA DI UNA BORSETTA BY JOANNA HOGG

The Soul of a Handbag: Joanna Hogg’s “Autobiografia di una Borsetta”

and the Poetry of Objects

Somewhere in the untamed beauty of Maremma, under a sky awash with painterly Tuscan clouds, a handbag sits alone on a rock. A Miu Miu Wander bag, stark in its elegant white silhouette, yet marred by dirt, bruised by time. It is not pristine; it is lived in. It is a relic of experiences, a vessel of human history. And in Joanna Hogg’s latest cinematic jewel, Autobiografia di una Borsetta, this handbag does not merely exist – it speaks.

As the 29th commission from Miu Miu Women’s Tales, Hogg’s film is an audacious departure from conventional storytelling, transforming a luxury accessory into a memoirist of modern Italy. The bag recounts its odyssey, slipping through the hands of a privileged teenage girl, an enigmatic working-class assassin, and many more. It traverses landscapes of extreme contrast – an ultramodern factory, a sprawling villa, the raw and restless urban peripheries – mapping out a social cartography that is as poetic as it is piercing.

Alexa Chung

Jordan Grant

Mackenzie Davis

Mia Regan

Hogg, a director celebrated for her restrained yet profoundly evocative narratives (The Souvenir, Unrelated), masterfully strips away dialogue and conventional protagonists, allowing the handbag to become both witness and storyteller. It absorbs the nuances of class, desire, and survival, whispering tales of luxury and loss, of power and transience. The result is a hypnotic meditation on the way objects mirror our own existences: How they outlast us. How they remember us. How they, in their quiet persistence, become us.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales has long stood at the vanguard of cinematic storytelling, curating a series that invites some of the most original female directors of our time to interrogate themes of vanity, femininity, and identity. Yet, Autobiografia di una Borsetta ventures into even deeper terrain – it is a fable of materiality, an exploration of what it means to live through objects, and what objects reveal about the people who possess them.

Sebastian Croft

Ellie Bamber

Saura Lightfoot-Leon

Emilia Jones

Aziya

Antonia Desplat

Charithra Chandran

Amalie Gassmann and Patricia Zhou

Arlo Parks

About Miu Miu Women’s Tales
Over 15 years and 29 unique episodes, Miu Miu Women’s Tales is the longest running commissioning platform of female-led short films. Directed by today’s most distinctive female filmmakers, every Tale is a beautiful, relevant world inhabited by women’s idiosyncratic imaginations. Since 2011 and across every continent, Women’s Tales has evolved and enriched in scope and meaning.
Miu Miu has asked filmmakers to celebrate femininity in the 21st century with a critical eye, armed with total freedom to create whatever they want. The Miu Miu clothes counterpoint the narrative drama throughout each episode. Across the film series, Miu Miu collections become a cast of characters in their own right, playing alongside noted actresses and models.
The Women’s Tales have extended Miuccia Prada’s lifelong commitment to culture-for-all into the art of filmmaking: a serious but playful examination of ever-transforming ideas around femininity she too has explored through Miu Miu for over 30 years.
The Tales create new, empowering roles and images of women for our times, around which a cross-generational community of cinephiles are rediscovering cinema in the post-cinema age. As Miuccia Prada put it herself, “with the Women’s Tales, we created a conversation with women about women.”

A Conclusion Etched in Time

As we watch the Wander bag weather the years, passing from hand to hand, absorbing the sweat, the secrets, the aspirations of its owners, we are reminded of a simple yet profound truth: fashion is not just adornment; it is anthropology. It tells the stories we do not speak aloud. In Joanna Hogg’s hands, a handbag is not a handbag – it is history, it is memory, it is life itself. And in its worn, beaten-up beauty, it reminds us that even the most luxurious things carry within them the marks of existence. A mark, just like ours, that time will never fully erase.

Tags: Amalie Gassmann and Patricia Zhou, arlo parks, Autobiografia di una Borsetta, Aziya, Charithra Chandran, Ellie Bamber, Emilia Jones, Joanna Hogg, Jordan Grant, Mackenzie Davis, Maremma, Mia Regan, Miu Miu, Miu Miu Wander bag, Miu Miu Women’s Tales, Miuccia Prada, Poetry of Objects, Saura Lightfoot-Leon, Sebastian Croft, What We Adore Magazine