By Nadine Kam

Nadine Kam photos
The storefront minutes after the Miu Miu name was added at far right.

Miu Miu opened its doors at Ala Moana Center this morning and I had to make the tough decision of rolling out of bed at 7 a.m. for the 8:30 a..m. blessing, or stay home and convalesce. I don’t know, maybe standing in the rain last week at the Royal was too much for me, combined with the stress of appearing in two traffic courts at the same time Monday. (Totally dismissed, of course!) I was moving at that typical local uncle’s glacial pace by Wednesday, and stayed home completely on Thursday.

I was awake anyway, before the alarm went off, and was debating the merits of going out in the rain again, or staying in bed, and bed was winning. I could always go later in the day, because the store will be there, but then I started thinking about parking and how nightmarish it would be any time after 9 a.m.

I wanted to snag a space in the sweet spot just beyond the new addition, behind and between Nordstrom and J. Crew-on-the-Island, which makes it easy to traverse the mall in any direction.

One of Miu Miu’s mosaic design dresses.

By the time I got there at 9 a.m., I found I could have stayed in bed because the kahu was late and wouldn’t be there until 10:30 a.m. Prada area manager Joseph Incao took charge and welcomed employees and first customers into the store. The blessing would have to wait.

It’s funny to me how these stores remind me of the process of sending newspapers to print at the last second, in that I’ve seen so many instances in which they’re always fitting the last tiles just before the guests arrive. With luck, you don’t see the menehune behind the magic, but this time the menehune were in plain view: Roberto Stefanini, Franco La Rosa, Rudi Malisani and Simone Gazzetti, who had come from Italy a month-and-a-half ago to work on the boutique. They were putting up one the finishing touches, the Miu Miu name on the storefront.

Prada area manager Joseph Incao, right, welcomes staffers to their new home.

One of the first shoppers inside the store was a woman headed to the airport, left, who couldn’t leave town without something from Miu Miu. She entered with large black suitcase in tow.

Garments and accessories can be seen at a glance.

Inside, the store is gorgeous, bringing warmth to luxury with the return of velvety wallpaper to evoke the feeling of being inside a dressing room or a closet. It’s very easy for shoppers to see everything at a glance.

Then there are the clothes. Miu Miu has a street-ready ease that makes it more wearable, to me at least, than Miuccia Prada’s loftier Prada line. It’s one thing to see the clothes in runway photos and another to inspect them up close where the details reveal themselves, particularly in new Greek and Roman mosaic-inspired designs that also incorporate a sort of mosaic of textures and fibers. Clothing prices run about $500 for tops and $940 for dresses.

The store is designed in a way that makes it easy to pick an outfit and accessorize it.

Stiletto pumps with external stitch details echoed on the shoe’s sock.

Mosaic dress closeup, and below, closer.

Jill Sherman, visual supervisor for Miu Miu/Prada, was in from Hong Kong for oversight and to document the store’s appearance. Below are her 2006 Miu Miu shoes with studs that inspired the fall/winter 2009 Prada men’s shoe collection.

Roberto Stefanini, a new fan of the shaka sign, was one of the workers helping to place the Miu Miu name on the storefront, following the schematic on the computer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 14th, 2009 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Men's, International fashion, Shoes, Shop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.