Joanna Hogg on her new film for Miu Miu and a lifelong relationship with style: ‘What we wear is very revealing’

‘I realised I was of great value, but sensed at the same time I was worth nothing at all, unless I was useful.’ These are the inner thoughts of a white matelassé leather handbag with gold hardware by Miu Miu, thoughtfully expressed in a new short film by British director Joanna Hogg that will premiere in London tonight (13 February 2025).

Autobiografia di una Borsetta is the 29th commission from Miu Miu’s ‘Women’s Tales’ initiative, set up by Miuccia Prada 15 years ago as a platform for female-led films, and which has featured previous works by the likes of Agnes Varda, Chlöe Sevigny, Lynne Ramsay, Miranda July and So Yong Kim.

Joanna Hogg on Autobiografia di una Borsetta, her new film for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales

Hogg’s creatively energetic offering, set in Italy, cleverly places Miu Miu’s ‘Wander’ handbag in the starring role, from its beginnings at the factory to its series of subsequent owners that include a bourgeois teenager and a female assassin. ‘I wanted it to be funny and I wanted it to be sad. And in 23 minutes that’s quite hard,’ Hogg says.

The film subtly weaves Prada-isms throughout. ‘I was really interested in that,’ says Hogg, who is wearing a neat velvet blazer and cardigan with wonderfully imposing spectacles as she unpicks her filmmaking processes over a pot of tea in Mayfair. There was no formal brief from Miu Miu, nor direct dialogue with Mrs Prada during the making of the film, though Hogg says she did approve of her eventual ideas.

‘I don’t know her [Mrs Prada] personally. I’ve met her a couple of times at events. But I was interested in representing what I knew, in a kind of almost spiritual sense in the film.’ I suggest to Hogg that there are lines of dialogue, such as the one that opens this article, which sound like Prada talking backstage after a fashion show. ‘I don’t know if you can quite unpick it as cleanly as that, but the way she is, or what I understand of how she is, is definitely in there,’ Hogg smiles.

It was also important to put herself – and some of her own ‘baggage’, she quips – within this film. ‘That’s partly why I make films, in order to feel like I’m exploring something. There’s a lens looking out and something very much looking inside of myself.’

Hogg’s critically acclaimed, meticulous body of work is often an exploration of upper-middle-class families and complex, layered relationships. It is autobiographical and novelistic. There is never a conventional script – Hogg produces a document that the actors interpret. She grew up in Kent, studied film at the National Film and Television School during the 1980s and then worked in television. Since 2008, she has made six feature films; her most recent was 2022’s ghostly masterpiece, The Eternal Daughter, executively produced by Martin Scorsese, and starring childhood friend Tilda Swinton, who also appeared in Hogg’s graduate film Caprice in 1986 and The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021).

While Hogg never rewatches her films (‘I just see too many things I want to change’), and baulks at the notion that they might be recognisably ‘Joanna Hogg’ for fear of being pigeonholed, there are arguably recognisable visual tropes in her work. One signature is a long pulled-back shot that allows the action to unfold at seemingly its own pace (‘I am very interested in the way people move,’ she says), while her background in photography often announces itself in the way she frames certain shots so that they almost resemble a painting.

There are various touches in Autobiografia that are classic Hogg, such as the posh bohemian clutter of the family villa at the film’s start and a beautiful shot of the handbag sat on an ironing board, looking out of an apartment window captured in a soft wash of natural daylight. But in the spirit of always wanting to push herself, she has played with a faster pace and rhythm in this film, while for the first time, she took on the role of cinematographer as well as director. And despite a layer of melancholia – fashion can be fleeting after all – the film’s biggest departure is perhaps a sense of witty, tongue-in-cheek humour.

During Hogg’s research for Autobiografia she attended the Miu Miu show in Paris in October with her film’s main star literally in her hand, an experience she said she absolutely loved. ‘It was a sort of ideas feast for me, looking at the shape of a shoe or a skirt,’ she enthuses. ‘I was actually filming the show through the handbag and establishing some of those visual ideas that I was then going to incorporate in the film.’ One of the reasons she chose the ‘Wander’ in the first place, she explains, was because ‘I saw the handle like an eye’. During the filming, she also placed an iPhone inside the bag to capture her heroine’s experience from a different visual viewpoint.

When she was very young, five or six, Hogg recalls, she was ‘quite a flamboyant dresser’; her two favourite colours were purple and orange. The character Lucky, whom Swinton plays in Caprice, a sort of surrealist romp through a woman’s magazine, was based on Hogg. ‘I was obsessed with fashion magazines; I did have tower blocks of magazines in my flat and I took them very seriously, but at the same time, I realised that perhaps they weren’t really helping my confidence. Although Caprice maybe seems like a piece of fluff, it was actually…’ She pauses. ‘I haven’t seen it for a long time… I can’t bear to watch it, it came out of quite a lot of soul searching.’ Her relationship with fashion now, she says, is still often fraught. ‘I do worry, am I wearing the right thing for the situation? I do think about it, I am quite vain in that way.’

Costume design is an integral part of her work. There are countless fashion moments in Hogg’s films, from Viv Albertine’s character D in Exhibition in an ensemble created from fluorescent tape, to Tom Burke’s Anthony in The Souvenir sporting colourful floppy bow ties and pinstripes, and Honor Swinton Byrne playing Julie (based on Hogg) in the same film, wearing vintage Vivienne Westwood, originally worn by Hogg in the 1980s.

In Autobiografia she worked with Grace Snell, the costume designer she has collaborated with on her last few films. ‘My conversations with Grace are very much about what would these characters wear?’ The pair decided that a group of travellers wouldn’t wear Miu Miu because they’re anti-materialists, while they decided that it would be fun to make the assassins a bit bling. ‘It was great to have these different stories to play with, but hopefully always at the service of the character. To show something about the person,’ she muses. ‘What we wear is very revealing.’

Autobiografia di una Borsetta, by Joanna Hogg, is available on Miu Miu channels on the evening of 13 February and available to stream on MUBI from 23 February, 2025.