Baz Luhrmann and Miuccia Prada on Their 30-Year Friendship—And Their Dazzling Costume Collaboration for Elvis

 Strangely enough, I don’t feel like trash is important today. I don’t know why, maybe we can understand together? Because it’s really true, you can’t understand the world if you don’t understand trash. But for the past two, three years, I feel that trash doesn’t bring me anything. It's probably because it’s more of a fantasy: a super-high, super-low fantasy, and I’m trying to understand it now exactly and be more realistic. More practical. More useful. I don’t know why, but I think it’s a moment where you can be somehow serious in your work. I feel it’s not the moment for fantasies though—of course, we’ll always have fantasy—but because it’s so difficult to understand what’s happening… the metaverse, NFTs, all that kind of world that is run in parallel. Is it good? Is it wrong? Also cancel culture, all the big, big problems that are around. You have to change the way you think or adapt. Is it wrong? Is it good to talk about politics? Because, for instance, I’ve always refused to talk about politics in my work because I always thought maybe fashion was too superficial and I didn’t want to be an opinionist. I always hated to throw out sentences on serious subjects because they require much more understanding and even if I have some, I always thought that I don’t have to use my job because I would feel uncomfortable because we’re still a company that does luxury stuff for rich people. You, as a director, have much more freedom because you can talk about anything. Me? I feel uncomfortable if I start talking about the problems I really believe in while doing this job.

What you’re saying, which I feel, too, is that on every level, every reference point is spinning. That this is not a time for fantasy and trash, this is a time for putting something out there that’s useful, practical. Like, who do you care about? What do you care about? Because it all might be gone tomorrow. I do feel that’s in the air. And it’s interesting, we only disagree on one thing, you and I. And we’ve had this discussion before. Which is that I disagree with your take that your fashion is not art.

We argue about it and I just don’t believe it. You may not see it, but I see you expressing the world… you’re under different pressures than I am. You have to get out an expression four or five plus times a year. So much! I don’t know how you do it, I could not do it. But when you were doing your ‘banana look’, I remember we talked about that. Remember the crazy banana dresses? That was a time when actually people needed a bit of—for want of a better word—humor and silliness and joy and irony. We needed that! But I see when you are making your work, even right now, it doesn’t mean it’s not sensual or it’s not smart, but you’re always either subconsciously or consciously trying to reflect the world around you.

In the movies, the reason I wanted to do the film of Elvis is that it’s not about Elvis Presley, it’s about America in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. And more importantly, it’s about a man called Colonel Tom Parker [Elvis’s manager, played by Tom Hanks] who was never a colonel, never a Tom, and never a Parker. He was a carnival barker and snake-oil salesman who was selling Elvis. Now together, Elvis absorbs all sorts of influences he grew up with: country and western, rhythm and blues, and most importantly, gospel. Gospel music is life.

lso, I have a problem, because now the world is really out there, huge, different races, different communities, different religions, different cultures. I am in this frenetic search of knowing and finding ways of navigating what is happening all around because it’s so big. And so, for instance, I asked the team at the Fondazione [Prada’s Milan art foundation] to have the intellectual debate on the phone every week and I read here and there and am desperately trying to understand and to learn, which is kind of impossible. Then what do you do? Go on trying [to synthesize] this kind of research? Or do you concentrate on what you know? Once, the artist Ryan Trecartin mentioned that a true invention would be to have a pill that could make you learn at speed all that is happening in real-time.