While profits fall across the luxury fashion industry, one kooky Italian label is posting record-breaking sales figures.

For a global industry worth almost £1.5tn, fashion is having a bruising time. Last month London fashion week had such a small number of catwalk shows it shrank to a weekend. Many of the biggest fashion houses are between designers, and even super-conglomerate LVMH – which includes Dior, Fendi, Louis Vuitton and most of the drinks brands in your cocktail cabinet – lost a fifth of its profits last year.

Yet the Italian brand Miu Miu almost doubled its profits this year, hitting close to £1bn in sales and being named “hottest brand in the world” by influential search site Lyst for the second year running. Retail sales were up 93%.

Miu Miu is owned by the Prada Group, a small conglomerate overseen by Miuccia Prada – including the well-known Prada label. In 1992, around 14 years after she started working for her family’s business, Mrs Prada – as she’s known in the industry – launched a cheaper womenswear subsidiary inspired by the sort of clothes (cardigans, skirts, wearable shoes) she wanted for her own wardrobe. Miu Miu is Miuccia’s nickname.

The label has always been a bit cooler, and crucially a little bit cheaper than many luxury fashion brands. But its recent success is down to more than just clothes. It’s the shows, the models, the campaigns and – the white whale of modern designers – Mrs Prada’s knack for turning out a viral trend.

Over its past five golden years, Miu Miu’s huge fashion hits have included a micro mini skirt with a raw hem that became so famous it spawned its own Instagram account; satin ballet pumps, which started an (ongoing) arms race for ballet shoes on the high street; £750 silk briefs designed to be worn without trousers and even plasters on toes. And that’s before we get to the It bags (the most liked luxury item on Vinted right now is a Miu Miu metallic handbag). For a designer who says she is vehemently opposed to trends – Prada’s menswear show in January was based almost solely “resisting the algorithm” –Mrs Prada has a gift for starting them.

“What I like about Miu Miu is that it’s irreverent,” says Elektra Kotsoni, deputy director for Vogue Business and Runway. Some of these trends, such as the skirt, aren’t even trends at all. In wearing it, you show you’re in on the joke.

But others, such as the ballet flats or this season’s fleeces, are strangely familiar. Kotsoni thinks this sets Miu Miu apart from other brands: “The mishmash of references in every collection basically seems to reflect what women already have in their wardrobes,” she says. “Everyone [can] dress in the style of Miu Miu even if they can’t afford to buy it.”

Fashion is as much about how you wear clothes as the clothes themselves, agrees Dal Chodha, editor and pathway leader of St Martin’s fashion communication course. “I have started to see a lot of young men wearing Miu Miu-style shrunken women’s cardigans around college. And I understand why – [the look] has a certain freshness; it feels knowingly cool.”

With the fashion landscape so crowded, the ability of these pieces to cut through our daily barrage of trends is what sets them apart. But it’s also the way they’re packaged up. Many brands play on the idea of archetypes, because there is no better way to sell clothes than through an imagined character that people want to be. Paris has the Chloé Girl, a vision of bohemian whimsy in floaty hems, while Milan has the edgier Miu Miu version, who is both salty, sweet and strangely ageless.

The success of the Miu Miu girl demonstrates Mrs Prada’s uncanny eye for spotting creative talent to front the brand – in the first flush of fame, making a comeback or just perennially cool. A year before Drew Barrymore’s iconic turn in Scream in 1997, she fronted a Miu Miu campaign. Lupito Nyong’o was Miu Miu’s girl the year she won the Oscar for best supporting actress. Emma Corrin, fresh from The Crown and sporting an elfin cut, has also fronted a campaign.

Sometimes, they’re not even girls. Willem Dafoe, 69, closed the last Miu Miu one, and so has Kristin Scott Thomas, 64. The autumn/winter 2024 show included Qin Huilan, a 70-year-old Chinese doctor from Shanghai, picked from Instagram.

Miu Miu recently hired the Russian stylist Lotta Volkova, who is known for her quirky model casting. In using real people, non-models and even men, these shows appeal to people who want to see themselves – or at least people that don’t conform to the usual beauty standards – reflected on the catwalk. “[Miu Miu is created by] women of different generations” says Kotsoni. “Your mum can wear it as well as your daughter.”

On top of that, while many fashion brands have cultural projects, few have Miu Miu’s cultural reach. Directors such as Miranda July, Chloë Sevigny and Joanna Hogg have made films for Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales short film initiative. The brand has just announced the second year of the Miu Miu literary club to be held at Milan design week. Last year’s Summer Reads event – when the brand gave away feminist books for free at news stands around the world – was another viral success story.

Finally for fashion editors, their love of Miu Miu may be all about the timing. The brand shows in Paris on the final day of the final fashion week of the season. If something is as much fun as Miu Miu, you’re more likely to remember it.