For an extension of Prada’s Spring 2025 campaign Moshfegh and Prada have collaborated on a set of short stories called Ten Protagonists. The bound edition, written by Moshfegh, is accompanied by portraits of actress Carey Mulligan wearing the new collection.
There is the sense in this slim volume that these great champions of character—Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons, and Ottessa Moshfegh—are quietly volleying with the aesthetic future of the modern woman. The women in this study each have a Shirley Jacksonish connection to something beyond themselves: They are puppeteers, vampiric twins, scientists, understudies, and translators. That otherworldly quality emerges from their fashion and vice versa. In clothing these characters tell something very personal about themselves, the material is reference to the immaterial. There is Alina the romantic programmer, with a cowlick protruding from her beehive hairdo and a horse bit garter belt. Fanny, the photographer in the yellow rain slicker, who grew up on a farm. Eleanor the archivist with her split loafers eating off cracked china. The one thing that unifies them: no matter who she is or what quirks define her, the Prada woman is a protagonist.
I caught up with Moshfegh the day before the launch (at which guests were so eager to get a book they tried to take home display copies). The 43-year-old award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and vintage obsessive wore an Adidas jumper over a denim shirt pulled out so the collar stuck up sharply. She talks frequently with her hands, does little vocal impressions to drive in her points, and possesses an arch personality that combined with her chameleonic ability to dissolve into a character has come to define a literary generation. We chatted about translation, hoarding, and the new novel she’s working on.
“But then Victoria/Veronica, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, these are twin vampires. Straight up.”’
First off, I loved reading the book.
I’ve been scared to read them because they are so different from anything I’ve written before. The collaboration is so spectacular. I usually feel like things come really easily, but having to translate between the looks, the character, Carey [Mulligan], the music, the photography—left alone I was like, “God what am I going to write?” I felt out of my element in a very exciting way.
[I was] thinking about how the Prada collection was really a collection of different characters, each look being a different woman. So I came up with some characters, just mini bios of how these women might be. On the day of the campaign shoot, I Zoomed with Carey in costume. She’s an actress, and it was really a production of a new self. They were like: What music should we play on set? That was the funnest part. It was like, “Okay, Carey, here’s who this person is. She comes from this place, and she has this sort of reaction, or this attitude. This is what she loves, and this is what she hates. And the song is…”
The songs weren’t included in the book!
I know… but there was Smashing Pumpkins, Stevie Wonder. You know that one look where Carey has a very straight, sort of full bob haircut and she looks like a superhero? Jesus Christ Superstar was playing.
I liked how careerist each character was.
It felt very important. When I saw the show, it felt like each of these women knew what they were doing. They were so self-contained and primary within their own universe. I loved that about them. They really felt like main characters to me, even the ones that were a little bit softer, more subtle. They seemed determined, fully defined, active doers, each with a talent and a ton of agency to sort of propel them forward on their own, on their own runway.
You have this doer thing that’s coupled with the immateriality of each story, where things are dissolving.
I felt like it would have been incorrect for me not to include that, I like that… immateriality… because it does feel like a collection that’s really about moving into the future and a not-yet-totally-materialized space in the universe where as we’re walking into it, we’re creating it. I wanted the language and the approach of the stories to feel slightly oblique. I wanted them to feel sincere, but the attitude of each character is that I wanted them to feel a little bit like she’s not giving us the whole picture. She’s giving us one element of a life that she wants us to show, but she is a much bigger and deeper person than that. There’s still a mystery about each character.
Can you tell me a little bit about the connection between the girls, if any?
It seemed like most of [the women] were more solitary entities. But then Victoria/Veronica, I was like, “Oh, my God, these are twin vampires. Straight up.”’ I love that look so much. That was the look I wanted. Something about that portrait, there’s the duality of being seen holding back, like, “I am presenting myself, but I’m presenting myself with control.” The dynamic of that felt like it was split apart in two. I thought it would be really interesting to write about twins and how they might separate or grow apart or develop accordingly.
For Cecily the understudy I was thinking about the duality of waiting to be someone else and watching someone be that other person. Then there were weird ones, like Tabitha the Puppeteer. That was one that I wrote and rewrote many, many times. It falls into the category of doubles, like Veronica/Victoria, Cecily the understudy, and Tabitha, because Tabitha is talking about this younger woman that she’s definitely projecting a lot onto. There’s something about that look that was so precisely off, I was like this woman has to be an artist, an unexpected kind of artist, and an observer, and it starts at this garden party. I knew that’s how it began, at a garden party.
“Oh my god. My Depop.”
What’s your relationship to clothing? What do you wear when you write?
Getting into character is really important for me, as is being comfortable and uncomfortable in very specific ways. I used to write in front of a mirror, because it makes you alert and also there’s this semi-horror when you catch yourself in a reflection during a moment where you’ve completely left your body, and there’s this recognition of self like, who am I? Who’s the character? What are they doing? Sometimes when I have to find words I’ll almost hear the word before I know what the word is. It sounds so silly, but it’s like… [she wafts her hands in the air] being in front of the mirror was actually kind of a helpful tool, and then it became very distracting. Sometimes I like to wear things a little bit too tight. Not that they’re not fitted correctly, but I like to be reminded of the boundaries of myself and my clothes at those times in a certain way. Maybe it’s a little bit masochistic or something, but I think if you’re too comfortable it’s very easy to be lazy and rely on your first thought, or first instinct, instead of, “if I keep pushing, where will this go?”
I completely agree with that discomfort. Maybe for a writer, because so much of the time you’re by yourself in your thoughts, it’s important to have some container… What was your first brush with Prada?
I haven’t lived in New York for a long time, but when I was in my early 20s, I used to walk by that store every day to work. I worked a very small publishing company called Overlook Press on Wooster Street in Soho, and I would take the N/R and get off at Prince. I don’t want to say the store always felt untouchable or unattainable, but there’s something about it that is so special and permanent. I’d compare it to walking by a museum and looking through the windows and feeling wowed. I think a lot of fashion is about fantasy and imagining new selves, but there was also a seriousness and a consideredness—you could see there was a profound intelligence inside those garments. I always thought it was fascinating and mysterious.
Are you someone who collects things?
That’s a nice way of putting it. Yes, I come from a family of collectors. My dad has always collected violins and fine instruments. He’s a self taught restorer of really old violins. He’s fascinating because he spends so much time thinking about the grain of wood, the kind of wood, the age of the wood, what piece could go here, and what varnish. There’s an obsessiveness about that that I really relate to. I collect clothes. I collect clothes and I try to cull out things when the collection feels like it’s getting too undefined. But I’ll do things like, “In 1964 they were making all these really shiny, tight bodice, brocade, A-line dresses, it would be cool if I just found, like, 100 of them, and decided which ones were the best.” I don’t buy all 100 but I look. Usually it has a relationship with something I’m working on. The novel I’m writing right now is not set in any real place or time, but it is very much meant to feel like Brighton, England in the ’90s, so I’ve been mining my entire life for memories and feelings and associations with the 1990s. Luckily, like there are a lot of fashion references right now to the ’90s, so it’s inspiring too.
“I used to write in front of a mirror, because it makes you alert and also there’s this semi-horror when you catch yourself in a reflection”
Can you tell me anything more about your next novel?
It’s about a teenage boy who is made to spend a year living by himself in a very fancy flat looking out in the sea. He’’s gotten into some trouble but because he’s from a privileged background he’s sort of allowed to spend this time not locked away somewhere, but being very closely observed, but free. He can’t leave his town, he goes to a social worker twice a week. He’s a weirdo, and he gets very obsessed with making prank phone calls and that leads to a bigger drama. The story, on the surface, is a little bit more maximalist than most of my other novels, there are a lot of characters. It’s told in third person. I’ve been writing it in a British accent in my head, which is really fun because it’s allowing me to push the language. I can’t fall back on the way that I would talk. At the heart of it it’s about the difficulty to feel and to communicate feelings. Basically it’s about parents that didn’t love their kids enough. Which is maybe a theme in my life, because I always think, “What’s that person’s problem? Oh, mom didn’t love them enough.” It’s called Only Children.
Are you an only child?
No. Are you?
God. Yes.
Obviously when you have siblings, you don’t ever wish you didn’t have siblings, but it completely shifts the way you perceive yourself inside of reality. You’re like, there are these other, not versions of me out there, but I’m the only of me.
I want to ask about your Depop.
Oh my god. My Depop. During the pandemic I was like, “Okay, this isn’t collecting anymore. This is hoarding.” I ended up trying to hold on to life, like, “I’m going to preserve this stuff, because I want it, and I want to keep it, I want to hold it, and I want to appreciate it so that it’s not just fluttering around.” Even a garment that’s made in a factory, after it’s been worn by a human being is a work of art. I’m a little bit too obsessed with that idea.
I started collecting a lot, and I ran out of room. I also started doing crazy things, like buying lots, like LOTS of vintage jewelry from the ’60s. I would get these huge boxes of antique jewelry. After a while, it was kind of grotesque for me to try to keep all of this stuff.So that’s sort of how Depop happened. Because I’m not on social media or anything, it was actually really nice to connect with my readers.
Unexpectedly during the pandemic, one of my novels, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, found a whole new readership of younger women in their late teens early ’20s. Everyone was having a mental health crisis, everybody felt like they wanted to sleep through this really difficult, universal experience.
You adapt your own books into films. Is that process closer to this collaboration than say, writing a novel?
Yes, 100%. I co-wrote an adaptation of Eileen with my husband Luke and that was a really collaborative process, and the first time I fully collaborated. It was such a full experience, walking into Eileen’s house. Adaptation is a lot like translation, in that it’s an art of its own, and can be really fun and liberating to depart from the original form of a story and redesign it and tell a new story with translated elements. This collaboration [with Prada]was very interesting because it started with the clothes. Usually you start with a character based on experience, or a personality trait or an intention, and then you decide what that character would be wearing. But this was outside-in. It felt like a different kind of adaptation.
The book will not be available for purchase, and will only be presented at select in-store events in New York, Tokyo, Milan, Paris, and London.
