Prada (Q746)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Italian luxury fashion house
- Prada SpA
- Prada
- Prada Group
- Prada S.p.A.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Prada |
Italian luxury fashion house |
|
Statements
1 January 1913Gregorian
designer
2000
2007
2002
design director
2008
womenswear and special projects
visual merchandiser
1988
creative director
1994
2020
co-creative director
design roles
1995
head of research and development
worked for
As usual, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have exquisite timing. Just days after Meta (rather belatedly and in the face of growing pressure) announced new settings and features for the Instagram accounts of teen users, the designers are raising their own skeptical eyebrows about the pervasiveness of “the algorithm.”Backstage, Prada astutely observed, “basically it seems that we are directed by algorithms, so anything we like and anything we know is because other people are instilling it into us.” She made it clear that she wasn’t condemning or even critiquing the situation. As the creative leaders of a global brand, she and Simons can’t simply abstain—the appearance of South Korean boy band Enhypen and the throngs of fans waiting outside for them were “blowing up our phones,” as the kids like to say. But gauging by the looks that came down the runway, I’d argue that Prada and Simons have some reservations about Filterworld, as the writer Kyle Chayka has described the flattening effect of these platforms in a book of that name.This was the most bonkers Prada show in some time, one with a superhero-from-outer-space streak, thanks to the goggle hats and porthole skirts, with additional touches of BDSM and cowboy Americana in the form of skirts suspended from harnesses and another trimmed with long white leather fringe. Meanwhile, it was built on a foundation of sportswear—sportswear that could almost be called straightforward save for the integrated wire that gave shirt collars and hems their askew angles and the trompe l’oeil belts implanted in trousers a couple of inches below the waist. Every shoe was different, and nearly all of them appeared to be revivals of popular styles from past collections.That archival element aside, there was no throughline, and that was entirely the point, even if it was discombobulating to the audience (as I overheard afterward) as well as to Prada herself. “I was very, very nervous for this show, much more than usual,” Prada said. “It was a different approach; instead of having three or four themes for the season, we were trying to do the whole in our way.”The best designers are the ones who not only respond to and mirror their times, but provide us with some sort of projection, a future vision for how fashion—and the greater culture—could be. Prada and Simons seem to be arguing for a world with more “main character energy,” to use another internet-y turn of phrase, and more individual style.
With fashion succumbing to quiet luxury blandness and online samey-ness irrelevance, theirs is a persuasive point of view. Why not pair a silver sequin dress with a yellow windbreaker and a UFO-shaped straw visor? What’s stopping any of us? Or what about a pinup star’s leather swimsuit with a folk singer’s brown suede coat? A T-shirt with a ball skirt? Miuccia and Raf have given fashion oddballs oodles of ideas to riff on with this collection. “We do our human proposition,” Prada said.
19 September 2024
Up in one corner of the Prada space was a small, white, pitched-roof house. From it a white fenced walkway led in a meandering slope down into an audience that was at last wrapping up its pre-show social media obligations and settling into its seats. Up in that house you could see light pulsing out from the windows and around the door, plus hear from some sound system within Maxi Jazz intoning “I can’t get no sleep” beneath the amphetamine beats of Faithless’sInsomnia.This created the impression that when the door finally cracked ajar and the first of 50-ish young models started their runway descent, they were stepping out into that twitchy and tinnitus-cursed netherworld between an all-night party and the punishingly lit unreality of the morning after. In truth, however, these models looked way too fresh faced to have spent the night losing their minds. Instead it was left to the collection to make you doubt you were always seeing things entirely straight.Apparently wool (actually cotton) trousers in a ’90s bootcut and dadcore fabrications—some of them pretty heavy looking—featured painted-on trompe l'oeil belts. It was hard to be sure as the models strode fast in front of you, but some of those pants looked to have been a little worn at the hem. Fitted Breton striped pullovers looked shadowed with sweat and running dye, their patterns apparently warped by enthusiastic movement: but that was the print. Colored V-neck knits or cardigans that at first glance looked worn over polo shirts or crew necks were at second glance evidently single knit garments. Collars and cuffs on floral shirts and cropped jackets were hoiked up or out by inbuilt wires in order to throw wild anti-gravity shapes. The impression of not quite trusting your eyes was reinforced by the mirrored wraparound sports shades whose lenses were printed with beaches and seascapes and other places you’d like to be transported to.Alongside the garments and accessories that were designed to make you second-guess your perception, others made you wonder if the models were their original intended audience. Some outerwear was cut so that the sleeves ended just below the wearer’s elbows and the skirts ceased slightly above the knees—the scale of these coats suggested that might have originally been sized for someone more diminutive than these towering young men: possibly even Mrs. Prada herself.
16 June 2024
In the Miuccia Prada profile in the March issue of this magazine, her co-creative director Raf Simons talks about their design process. “Anything can be a starting point, he said, “whether we love it or hate it or think it’s silly or funny or sad or stupid or political.” This season, their starting point was, of all things, the bow.The black shift that marched out first today was bedecked with a couple dozen of them. Baby pink and deep purple versions of the dress came later, as did many further iterations of the bow, including at the back of skirts that were sturdy tweed in front and embroidered silk in back, as if their wearers had tied an apron over their underslip. (There was a lot of this kind of different-coming-than-going construction; much of the collection looked quite distinct front-to-back.)Prada has never been one for the silly, funny, or stupid, so was there something political in this reclamation project? In the backstage crush, the designers talked about romance, love, and emotion, as well as history. “History teaches you everything. Especially in difficult moments,” Prada said in a press statement. “This is a collection shaped by history. It’s not about nostalgia, it’s about understanding.”Bows have been the subject of much online discourse of late, partly because fashion has seen an inordinate amount of them in recent seasons, and partly because they’ve been taken up by the TikTok generation as a girlish affectation, a way to hold onto youth and reject adult responsibility, apparently.Vogue’s Prada profile is relevant here; she told the writer Wendell Steavenson, “It’s strange, because, every single morning I have to decide if I am a 15-year-old girl or an old lady.”When the present feels tough and scary, and the future outlook even bleaker, the past comes up for everybody. It wasn’t just bows that Prada and Simons were playing with. There were letterman jackets with “P” patches on the chest and the year of Prada’s founding, 1913, stitched on the arms; there were sweater girl twinsets in mismatched colors worn with knee- and midi-length skirts that would’ve been prim, swanny, if you like, if not for their geometric seamed construction; and there were more of those vintage-look slips with scrollwork trimming their hems and seams.The models wore their bags suspended from mini-belts in the crooks of their arms and held their hands to their chests, an old-fashioned gesture in the age of clutched iPhones.
If that did indeed seem nostalgic, the 1950s couture-ish cocktail dresses at the end of the show made with technical high performance fabric and matching gloves were fine examples of Prada and Simons’s gift for repurposing familiar, even banal, tropes into pieces that look new and desirable. Not only that: something about that indestructible fabric felt a little bit political (don’t know about you, but that’s what I want from Prada) and quite right for this moment.
22 February 2024
Just another day in the office. We filed into the Fondazione Prada at the end of lunch hour. Immediately inside the doors was a warren of gray-carpeted work cubicles, all immaculately tidy in adherence with company policy. Prada screen savers gleamed softly under industrial lighting. Those keen to mark their return paused to photograph themselves. Around the corner into the main workspace, heads down, and—wow!This set for this season’s Prada menswear (and presumably for the womenswear to come too) consisted of a raised glass floor supported by iron struts just over three feet high. Beneath us was what appeared to be a stream running through a meadow. Water pumped forth from beneath the runway entrance, then meandered onward over river stones, idly pushing autumn leaves down its course. There were patches of grass and reed. The initial surprise was considerable. Above the glass, however, behavior swiftly returned to normal working protocols. The runway also meandered, its path defined by a line of tightly packed office swivel chairs. Its course became quickly clogged by crowds keen to secure content featuring Metawin Opas-iamkajorn, Karina, Lee Jae-wook, and other guests. Once the course eventually cleared, the real shift began.Said Mrs. Prada backstage: “In this moment you can’t avoid talking about subjects that are relevant—for instance, nature.” As she and Raf Simons jointly explained, the thinking behind the collection was intimately entangled with the notion of our natural environment: how we are insulated from it and how to go back to it. Added Simons: “Most people’s screen savers are nature, but then at the end, we sit in this very synthetic, human-made environment.”The collection included wearable working environments for multiple manners of man: Simons listed “the businessman, the working man, the thinking man.” Most wore ties. The Prada twist was touches that subverted these safe spaces of identity, enticing the wearer to dive into the elemental, to surround himself with nature. Textured swimming caps (a perennial Prada classic) were teamed with goggle-like spectacles with side panels and leather sandals. Narrow-fit raincoats, tweed chore jackets (a new-fabric adaption, carried over from last season), three-button gray topcoats, and gold-button naval outerwear (in cracked leather or navy nylon) all offered a route outdoors.
Belts in triangular sections of leather were sometimes affixed with equipment packs; larger nylon totes were webbed with smaller equivalents in leather.The second besuited commuter wore leather slippers, the same footwear that Simons mentioned he tends to wear when walking his dog first thing in the morning: “In these moments I really think in a different way about nature.” He also mentioned the Elfstedentocht, a Dutch cultural celebration (and ice-skating race) only possible when certain rivers freeze in winter. You suspected a critique of broader human denial—man’s Canute insistence on continuing “normal” patterns of behavior despite the waters rising to drown him—but both designers remained circumspect. “Probably there is something that is about the weather,” conceded Mrs. Prada. “Absolutely.”Of that amazing set, Mrs. Prada was less noncommittal: “It was menacing. For me it was scary. That was the impression I had the first time I saw it. What is scary is the nature that you can’t touch through the glass.” Just before the show began, however, I spotted a spider on a seat alongside me: It had worked its way through.
14 January 2024
Don’t let the slime, which dripped and slapped down the middle of the peachy-pink mesh steel runway at Prada today, fool you. It might make good quote-unquote content—it certainly did when it poured down at the men’s show in June—but this was a collection devoted to craft and technique. Surrounded by reporters backstage, Miuccia Prada said, “I got tired talking about ideas—let’s talk about clothes.”Aren’t all runway shows about clothes? Well, yes, but as Raf Simons went on to explain, “craft isn’t something that gets talked about a lot at Prada, at least not as much as at other houses. We wanted to show what we could do.” It wasn’t a matter of how many hours it took to embroider this and how many petites mains were involved in making that. “That’s irrelevant,” he said with a wave of his hand. “The figuring out if it can be done” was the part that got him and Prada going. Two techniques, in particular, got special mention from Simons. The first was the printed fringe they used on floral shirts that gave the individual blooms a shifting depth. And the second was the long skeins of metal fringe used for skirts “built like jewelry.” They’re conversation starters, for sure.Prada has very much been in the fashion conversation lately. Last year’s revenues jumped 21% over 2021, but you don’t have to know the company’s financials to understand that it’s resonating. Up and down the front rows, you see its pointy-toe kitten-heel slingbacks, and across the market they’ve spawned twisted-lady shoe lookalikes. With its emphasis on the crafts of the eccentric variety—both weathered and patched-together leather and panné velvet were affixed with firework swirls of crystal, and there was yet more fringe embellished with metal eyelets—this collection seemed destined to foil the copycats, though doubtless they’ll try.Like the men’s spring show, the foundation here was a tailored silhouette: broad-shoulder shacket (with the cuffs of a shirt and the lapels of a jacket) tucked into the belted waistband of high-rise shorts or front-pleat, tapering-to-the-ankle pants. Some of these odd suits were swathed in sheer printed scarves that the show notes described as “fragments of dresses.” Their ethereality provided a link to the collection’s other key shape, sleeveless shifts with ’60s-via-the-’90s lines made from organza and gazar of such gossamer fineness they seemed to float down the runway.
A couple of other things that got people talking: the already-worn-in barn jackets (why not wear one over a Jazz Age flapper dress?) and the hand-carved mythological-man clasps adorning evening bags that reproduced a shape first designed in 1913 by Prada’s grandfather, who traveled the world picking up unique baubles like those carvings.Fabio Zambernardi, the design director of Prada and Miu Miu and Miuccia’s closest collaborator who resigned this year after three decades at the company, joined the designers for a bow, doffing his cap, embracing them both, and inspiring a standing ovation in the process. Behind the glossy—or in this case, gooey—surface, many hands worked mightily on this knockout collection.
21 September 2023
Talk about fluid tailoring: Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer”—with its chorus lyric “I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal” hadn’t even begun when this Prada show’s most spectacular moment of release left the crowd ooh-ing out loud in mass satisfaction. The third look—a fringed print white shirt and black schoolboy short—had just passed by on the industrial meshed steel runway. Suddenly, irregular lines of slime started oozing from the ceiling, falling on either side of the models. It settled into a pale green puddle as it slowly drained away. In its free fall sticky state, the gunky stuff that waterfalled down looked like something left by Slimer inGhostbusters, or the alien inAlien, or a snail on a rug, or—on certain happy occasions—humans having a good time.Said Mrs. Prada afterwards: “Now, in this time, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas.” Together she and Raf Simons dressed their spring 2024 men in outfits that echoed the relationship between that rigid runway mesh and the glinting plasma that spurted from and through it. The starting point was a tailored silhouette featuring broad shoulders bolstered by (removable) pads, a cinched waist, with elongated jacket skirts and sleeves. Below were high-waisted bottom halves that (when not hemmed as shorts mid thigh), ballooned around the groin from the naval thanks to generous side pleats before tapering down to the ankle.Simons said that this silhouette was meant to echo the heroically enhancing tailoring paradigm of the 1940s. It was Prada-fied through a process of reduction and enlightenment: archaic heavy wools were upgraded with ultralight modern equivalents, and instead of the heavy architecture of tailored construction, those jackets were as unconfining as the lightest poplin shirt. Said Simons: “When we think about the body we also think about the idea of the inside and the outside, about the way a body is not still. Very often in the sartorial, it ends up being a very architectural construction and the body is partly restricted.” He added that artists whose work had informed the collection included H.R. Giger (who birthedAlienbefore John Hurt) and Joseph Beuys, who exhibited disembodied editions of his own heavy rabbit felt suit.Through and from this heavy-looking but ultra-light starting point, other elements began to push, ooze, or burst to the surface. There were those floral shirts, whose fringing and sleeves took them one evolutionary Prada step beyond its signature Hawaiian shirts.
There were traditional shirts that had been subject to a freakish growth spurt, transformed into full length coats. There was a section of constriction free denim jeans topped by functionally expansive multi pocket work gilets and then fine-gauge knit shirting in navy, through which luxuriant furry tufts appeared to be sprouting.The gilets reappeared in faux fur, maybe as another nod to Beuys, as the color scheme softened from the opening black to shades of blush. Then the three-button Beuys jacket shape was transformed from a tailored piece into what most closely resembled a sailing parka, cut in technical nylon and then heavy weathered leather. Toward the end, the pockets and the flowers were commingled and conjoined on shirting in blush and a pale coffee brown: The pockets were built into the shirting and the flowers, as painted resin ornaments, sprouted from them. Being Prada, this menswear collection was designed to stimulate the cerebrum as much as any other body part. But it was also consistent with the recently-repressed animal urge also unleashed (pornographically) at DSquared2 and (sensually) at Dolce & Gabbana this season. Masculine sexuality, of whatever flavor and inclination, is coursing through the runways of Milan once more.
18 June 2023
A year ago today news was breaking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As we gathered at Prada last February, there were questions about the place of fashion amidst impending war. Some wondered if the shows should be canceled. In the time since, the world has changed in ways profound and everyday.The white lily pin, folded origami style from humble cotton, that came with Prada’s invitation looked like it could be a marker of today’s somber anniversary, an acknowledgment of the seriousness of what has passed, but also a hope for the future. That notion seemed to be confirmed backstage, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, amidst a crush of supporters, talked about the act of caring. “Mainly what I care about now is to give importance to what is modest, to value modest jobs, simple jobs, and not only extreme beauty or glamour,” Prada said.Prada has always rejected the obvious, of course; by embracing the “ugly” she has redefined what we think of as beautiful time and time again. With Simons, her instinct this season was to examine uniforms, and by extension to honor the humble, caring acts of the people who wear them. Nurses’ whites got a thorough consideration, transformed into long-line shirt dresses complete with short trains, and a trio of capes could’ve been lifted off a World War II era recruitment poster for the army nurse corps.Military uniforms proved ripe for elevation by reinterpretation, too. Parkas came with elegant Watteau backs or were puffed into couturish cocoons. Army shirts and ties tucked into high-fitting tapered trousers looked definitive; the pants are apt to make women who’ve embraced the full-leg shape on so many other runways seriously rethink their closets.On the skirt front, there was much more variety: minis, pencils, and voluminous swing skirts all made appearances, some accentuated with more of those origami fabric flowers. This was the flipside of the concept, Simons explained backstage: turning the embellishments you see on wedding dresses, which are another sort of uniform of care, into everyday attire. The simple crewneck sweaters in camel and charcoal gray they were paired with were effective partners in that regard.The shirtless blazers with detachable dickey-style collars and the pillowy white down-stuffed puffers and miniskirts were evolutions of ideas they proposed in their menswear show a month ago.
There too the project was to enhance reality, rather than to indulge in runway theatrics, or stir up viral social media moments, though it’s true that Charli D’Amelio, the 18-year-old TikTok phenom, was seated front-row.Can fashion have it both ways? Can designers balance the precariousness of the world and the responsibility not just to dress their customers but to entertain? This persuasive collection provided much food for thought, and a heaping serving of new things to want to wear.
23 February 2023
The collection was entitled Let’s Talk About Clothes. Yet before we got to the garments, there was another substantial material reality to negotiate. This was the presence of Enhypen, the Korean seven-piece boy band, and their at-least 7,000 hard-screaming IRL fans who thronged the heavily fortified Fondazione Prada this afternoon. The band brought presents for Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons, and seemed charming. That fanbase was a force of nature whose enthusiasm raised the roof.In truth the roof was rising already. The show was held in a Fondazione space pared back as never before, right down to its poured concrete bones. Above us was installed a sunken roof of plasterboard in the same sludgy tone, about a meter above our heads. During the show—and I confess I didn’t notice at the time—it slowly rose, until sinking again at the finale. “We changed what it did only last night,” said Raf Simons backstage before catching himself. “No, I won’t say it!”Because what he and Mrs. Prada wanted to talk about was clothes. Of their recent dialogues, Raf Simons said: “we talk about how we want to work really hard to make clothes that can have a reality in this world, but which on the other hand still push it, which have a fashion point of view.” To achieve that they worked on a series of archetypal masculine garments in which they tried simultaneously to transmit both minimalism—or at least reduction—along with comfort and warmth. These two factors, he noted, if not quite oppositional are seen most certainly as uneasy bedfellows. The third factor, a pinch of Prada seasoning, sometimes echoed motifs from past seasons. This was the formula.The first cluster of looks presented minutely-articulated variations—three-buttoned or two-, single-breasted or slightly doubled—in a kaleidoscope of charcoals. The cut was slim but floating, both to cut and physique. Instead of shirting the models wore detachable collars in various patterned fabrics, a motif that returned throughout the collection.These crisp cottons were the same used for the pillowcases, with accompanying pillows, sent out along with the show invitations. They were there to echo as “a Prada gesture” the floating sailor collars we had seen in past house collections for both men and women. The jackets were suddenly replaced with two blazers in suede, before a cocoon-like top—prefigured by those pillows—that more resembled something to lay your head on than slip your body into.
An equivalentpiuminoversion of Prada’s vaunted vest followed directly. Two (collarless) engorged and pillowish MA-1 bombers in the classic orange-lined colorways were next. These were the first in what Simons called “the stereotypes” of outerwear, a series that included a parka, a donkey jacket, and a duffel coat. They were cut extra-long, like formal feminine evening dress, and then quickly repeated in radically foreshortened equivalents.The collection continued its unfolding with a dialogue between color, texture, and form articulated through slim fit pants worn over colored cardigans and top coats shot through with retro-futuristic go-faster panels of contrasting and dynamic tones. The models carried totes, seemingly containing water bottles (and you’d think a lunchbox too) that were sometimes puckered in texture like cast-steel industrial flooring. At the end the white collar uniform of the introduction was supplanted by a modern version of a blue-collar equivalent; suede work aprons transformed into dresses, sometimes worn under topcoats. These pieces spoke—extremely succinctly—of several assumptions at once relating to work, class, and gender. It wasn’t only Simons who spoke tonight—Mrs. Prada was deep in conversation with the Italian press as he spoke to us. Arguably the most articulate protagonist in the room however was the collection they crafted together.
15 January 2023
The Prada Fondazione was covered in black craft paper for today’s show. Cut into the set walls were windows behind which short videos by the director Nicolas Winding Refn of Drive fame played: clips of a coat on a wooden dining chair, an empty kitchen, women in repose on couches. Were these scenes of domestic bliss? Knowing our protagonists, and understanding the two years we’ve all been through, that doesn’t seem likely.Instead, what Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons seemed to be after was some sort of truth—peering behind the curtain for a glimpse of reality or its close verisimilitude. “There is a sense of the life of women,” Miuccia Prada said in a prepared statement. “Life and humanity crafts the clothes—not superficial embellishment, but traces of living, leaving marks. This idea of clothes shaped by humanity excites us.”The first look, in its corporate anonymity, seemed to belie that statement. Where’s the humanity in a dour gray top coat and lighter gray button-down onesie? But before long, the layers came undone. The boxy tailoring of that coat, for example, was replaced with an old-fashioned nightie, the familiar logo triangle embroidered on its tulle neckline.Picking up on the craft paper of the set, they used paper—“the most simple, modest material”—for dresses whose color and print didn’t quite meet the edges. These were the most thought-provoking pieces in the collection. The white outlines at necklines and hems gave the sleeveless shifts an unfinished, work-in-progress quality, like an artist made clothes out of a freshly painted canvas, rather than putting it in a frame. Knit sweaters and skirts, meanwhile, came pre-creased in places, and the skirts’ slits were left raw-edged, with the slips underneath following the same almost ragged lines. The white nighties and peignoirs over black briefs and the icy silk duchesse dresses tapped into beloved parts of the house archives.Trained for decades to see Mrs. Prada as fashion’s fortune teller, a mostly silent arbiter with an outsized influence, we come to Prada shows eager to know how we’ll want to dress next season. On that topic, the house founder and her partner had a new idea, and it goes back to that skinny legged, stripped of all excesses all-in-one. Many designers are thinking wider and fuller for spring—the overwhelming vibe is go big or go home. But here the silhouette was tapered to the ankle and punctuated with a boxy coat or jacket and chunky cowboy boot mary janes.
A new Prada uniform? In his own comments, Simons said, “more than any other collection, this one is filled with different views… different bodies of work, within a single body of work—shifting between disparate form languages.” The early adopters will have been taking notes.
22 September 2022
Asked backstage what he and Mrs. Prada were thinking when they put together this collection, Raf Simons cheerily countered: “What doyouthink we’ve been thinking?” With a charming appearance of regret, Mrs. Prada smilingly added that under current Prada protocols, post-show critical comment is “forbidden.” One fellow scribbler standing close by only half heard and thought she’d meant that Forbidden was the theme of the collection. He was disambiguated.The designers’ sphinx-ily enigmatic position is fair enough. The air of mystery generated by inscrutability is highly stimulating to some. And off-the-cuff comments sometimes get misinterpreted—even if they also lead to dialogue. So we were left with a riddle only partially unlocked by the emailed press release and quotes attributed to the designers that came in after a show that, as you watched it unfold, felt like playing a menswear Wordle.The first character we cracked was suiting. It came black, skinny in the pant and cropped at the top of cowboy boots. Jackets were single or 1.5-breasted, cut slim and low. Then up popped leather: frisson-making black double-zip short-shorts worn against sleeveless tops and coats. Shortly afterwards the shorts came accented with a series of striped rib knits.Between look 16 and look 19 came the conceptual meat-and-potatoes via purposefully banal notch collared knee-length four-button coats delivered in leather, gingham and off-white. The models were sometimes double-coated, sometimes single. The shorts underpinned the looks. This coat was a material version of the paper coat that had arrived with the invitation. A colleague had tried his on, and it immediately ripped apart. The paper reflected the set-up: the Fondazione showspace had been laid out like an oversized house interior, whose white walls, gingham curtains and pale brown floor were also made of paper. Was this a prompt to make us consider how matters that seem so substantial and fixed—such as codes of attire or interiors—are fundamentally arbitrary? There still weren’t quite enough characters in play to conclude.Next up were some leather-edged back-buttoned shirts in shopping bag checks, with craftily naïf ric-rac trims that echoed Prada’s pyramid cipher. There was a brief section of attractive washed denim. Sneakers, cool sneakers, appeared between those Cuban heeled boots.
After a brief suity redux and some bottle print T-shirts worn with marginally shorter short-shorts than before, a powerfully normcore beige blouson prefigured a final triptych of looks that played leather against more banal beige coating.
19 June 2022
The ribbed sweaters and taffeta minis with trains from Miuccia Prada and Raf Simon’s spring collection are this season’s street-style gets—they’re easily the most photographed pieces since the designers joined forces in early 2020. That’s partly down to the pandemic—there were fewer gatherings at which to show off Prada trophies a year ago—but mostly because they make for an unexpected pairing that happens to be as easy to wear as it is identifiable. Together that adds up to something ineffable; it looks like now.The designers’ follow-up for fall is a fitted white tank, triangular logo front-and-center, with a narrow just-below-the-knee skirt divided horizontally in different combinations. Kaia Gerber’s show-opener merged gray flannel, crushed black satin, and a crystal-dusted metallic mesh, but others were sheer to the waist, exposing the boy briefs that the models wore underneath.These pieces formed a foundation on top of which Prada and Simons showed simple Shetland wool sweaters and others that revived the label’s breakout “ugly” prints of the ’90s; mannish single-breasted jackets and double-breasted ones decorated on the upper arms with rings of faux fur or feathers; and oversized MA1s picked out with paillettes. Again, there was that emphasis on unlikely combinations, and the sense of import that kind of intentionality creates: making an occasion out of the everyday.“You want to live again, to be inspired. And to learn from the lives of people,” Prada said in a statement that was distributed after the show. Our great post-pandemic reawakening has been foreshortened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and incipient war, but her point remains: dress like you mean it.The silhouette didn’t reach the extremes of the men’s collection last month, but the proportions—of black coat dresses draped with askew pearl necklaces, of leather trenches in black and shocking pink—were exaggerated. The shapes conveyed strength, not the decorum or daintiness that the lingerie foundation underneath might suggest. That message was underlined by the cast, which included models who walked Prada runways 20 years ago—Erin O’Connor, Liya Kebede, Elise Crombez, and Hannelore Knuts—amidst new faces like Hunter Schafer.As has become their practice, Prada and Simons were looking back at past Prada collections. “I think of revolutionary moments in Prada’s history, and we echo them here,” Simons said in his statement.
“There are never direct recreations, but there is a reflection of something you know, a language of Prada.” Scrolling through the archive to find the reference isn’t the point, though fashion obsessives will have lots to work with here. More interesting is how together they made something sort of implausible—like, say, a herringbone coat with that proportion-shifting acid green faux fur treatment on the sleeves—suddenly look right.
24 February 2022
Watching Jeff Goldblum close this show was worth the admission alone. Clad in a dark, furry mohair hemmed and elbowed overcoat, dark big-break pants and dark chisel toe shoes, his walk was at first linear and direct. Then one arm came up at his side and undulated, snakily. The other arm followed, as if seeking counterbalance. He veered rightwards in front of the first photographers’ pit, and as he did so, shot a sharp, hawky gaze—eyes narrowed—90 degrees to his left. The applause rose as he headed with woozy intent to the vectored tunnel that led backstage. A man on the edge, Goldblum worked it.Which was the appropriate climax for a collection named Body of Work that approached the hierarchy of workwear as its baseline assignment while echoing against the body of work of both its designers. Inevitably, for instance, the starry cast here recalled the classic Prada fall 2012 collection whose protagonists included Willem Dafoe, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, Jamie Bell and Adrien Brody. Backstage that day Miuccia Prada described it as “a parody of man power.” Oldman called it “two-minute theater—a short blast of performance.”Goldblum apart, this 10-year anniversary sequel featured Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Asa Butterfield, Damson Idris, Tom Mercier, Jaden Michael, Louis Partridge, Ashton Sanders, Filippo Scotti and show opener Kyle MacLachlan. Similar too to that original, this show employed its cast to role play masculine archetypes whose relative status by occupation was both delineated and disrupted by their uniforms. As Prada said in a pre-written quote released after the show: “We were thinking about meaningful fashion, pieces that make sense. Clothes that make people feel important.” She added: “The collection celebrates the idea of working—in all different spheres and meanings. It is a practical, everyday thing. But here, you are formally important. You are not casual.”Also not casual were certain parallels with Raf Simon’s fall 2012 collections both for Jil Sander and, to a lesser extent, his own brand. As at Sander then, at Prada today one masculine category was framed in hulking leather trench coats, in a fit oversized to infantilize—or at least deauthorize—as at the ten-year-gone Raf show. There were also hugely cinched waists on lengthened bombers and field jackets, and preening, relishably ostentatious furry mohair trimmings—most successfully served on an oversized orange MA1.
Whether these details served to emphasize the dignity of work through the elevation of its uniform (as the notes today had it) or acted to parodically undermine the self-importance of conventional masculine status systems (as Mrs. Prada put it a decade ago) depended on where (and maybe when) you were coming from.As at the Prada fall collection of a year ago, these facades all shared a similar base undergarment that rested between them and the body within. This year’s update on last year’s knit long john was, said Simons, “lightweight material overalls, deux-pieces, referring to the idea of work, movement, activity and leisure.” Expanded in volume and rematerialized in leather or treated silk, these overalls were sometimes also given star facade billing. Thus, overall versus furry mohair trimmed executive overcoats encompassed the vocational span of this finely performed and highly Pradafied spectrum of modern workwear.
16 January 2022
Today’s Prada show was our first chance to see Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s work on the runway IRL. Their collaboration began just as the pandemic descended, and with only videos to tell the story, it could feel at times like the project was in its beta phase. Eighteen months later, with vaccines reopening the world, the brand staged two simultaneous shows, one at home in Milan and the other at Shanghai’s Bund One. At the Fondazione Prada, large LED screens were placed around the runway, and via the live feeds we could see different models striding by in the same looks.“It’s no longer about a small world—in fashion, or elsewhere,” said Simons in the press notes that were released postshow (the ongoing COVID-19 situation made the usual backstage scrum impossible). “Doing these shows simultaneously demonstrates a new possibility… Community is a vital idea: drawing together people who share ideologies, values, and beliefs.” The Pradaverse tuned in online too, of course.The collection itself felt especially tuned in. Collectively, people on the streets and people inside the fashion industry are embracing sexiness. There’s a diversity of opinion about what’s sexy, but generally speaking, clothes have gotten tighter, smaller, and more see-through as we begin emerging from this crisis. The young generations display a new kind of body positivity that can be frankly startling for older types who didn’t grow up as free. Ultimately, though, their boldness is heartening.Seduction, Stripped Down is the name Prada and Simons gave to the collection. In her notes, Prada said, “We thought of words like elegant—but this feels so old-fashioned. Really, it’s about a language of seduction that always leads back to the body. Using these ideas, these references to historical pieces, the collection is an investigation of what they mean today.”The historical ideas in question are the familiar tropes of womanhood, like bra cups and corsetry boning, made unconventional by how they were presented: on simple, even plain, sweaters or as details on denim coats. Duchesse satin sheaths read as almost demure until the dresses turned to reveal they were unbuttoned to the lower back, exposing peekaboo flashes of lingerie. The long evening column also got a rethink; it was sliced above the knee, but a bow in back extended to the floor. “That feels modern,” Simons stated.Prada never approaches anything straight on, it goes without saying.
The hard/soft interplay of raw or distressed leather jackets and tiny duchesse satin miniskirts trailing trains counted as the collection’s strongest, most directional proposal. The low-heeled slingbacks were a well-judged touch. It’s not easy to redefine sexy, as we’ve seen elsewhere this week. Sexy is such a hackneyed concept, in fact, that fashion had more or less rejected it for the half decade leading up to the pandemic. But today in Milan and Shanghai, Miuccia and Raf nailed it.
24 September 2021
As my colleagues back at the Vogue Runway mothership in New York have been noting (with notable zeal), thus far spring ’22 menswear is shaping up to be a startlingly skimpy season. Flesh-flashing, body-baring, call it what you will: yesterday alone saw Fendi and Dolce & Gabbana present some strongly stripped-down looks. And today Prada expressed the instinct to offer unconfined interaction with the elements. Because after the months of confinement we’ve all endured, who doesn’t want to feel the wind and water directly on their skin? Who doesn’t want to feel alive in the world?Prada being Prada, of course, this was an instinct articulated more cerebrally than atavistically. Or as co-creative director Miuccia Prada observed in a quote released shortly before we gathered at the Fondazione Prada in Milan to watch the collection video: “A sense of the utopian, the ideal, of hope, positivity. To expose yourself to nature, to go to the beach—it’s freedom. It is utopian. That is really a primary need—an intellectual need, too.” This translated into a skin-heavy rendering of a reemergence that was tantamount to a rebirth.The film opened with the models negotiating a “meandering red tunnel” (as per the notes), ready for the world ahead, but not yet in it. Very directly we were presented with some of the key motifs of what looked like a commercially strong Prada suite: bucket hats with almond-shaped brims at the back (a bit British policeman’s helmet) with triangular logo pockets, and some with the awesome functionality of slits at the front to allow sunglasses to be slipped in them. Romper suits with turned-up short hems were presented in corporate-worker charcoal cotton or sailor-boy white, the latter printed with tattoo-ish nautical motifs including octopi, voluptuous mermaid/sirens, anchors and anchor fish: these reminded slightly of Prada’s prints from fall 2016’s romantic sailor collection.Another key example of self-reference—ingenious insurance against the call-out crew—was the skort that will probably be remembered as the defining garment of this collection but which also echoed those of spring ’17 womenswear. More expert Pradaphiles than me at the lunch afterwards noted over our green beans and octopus further references that stretched way back to the 1990s.Around two minutes into the film, Prada’s boys finally hit the beach.
The scenes were filmed at the south-eastern point of Sardinia, on the coast of Capo Carbonara, an area where the house is funding the reforestation of marine ecosystems. By coincidence, it is also where I’m booked to spend my summer holiday. It was in this setting that the presentation changed from formulaic runway walk into something more apparently spontaneous and free, in order to evoke an essence described by Raf Simons in his pre-show quote portfolio: “The primary feeling is one of joy. It’s almost like that memory of a child, the joy of a child going to the beach. The simplest and most honest of pleasures. In all its simpleness, it’s also something very meaningful and timeless.”
20 June 2021
As Miuccia Prada saw it, the message of her latest men’s collection was simple and obvious. “Survival,” she said backstage. “And to survive, you have to be strong.” There have been seasons when Miuccia toyed with the fragility, the ineffectuality of the modern male. Not this time, thank God. The setting was a tight little carpeted pit, almost a cage; Thunderdome with shag pile. One model sported a tasseled headband, like an extreme fighter. The clothes themselves began as emblematic Corporate Man: gray suit, matching topcoat, black oxfords. Then in crept an ever-harder edge. First, a laser-cut leather duster, almost monkish in its austerity. Next, a shoe covered with studs, presaging an avalanche of hardware on shirts, pants, jackets. Toughen up, tough it out—that’s what the leather and metal was saying.Still, while you're picturing studs armoring gray flannel or a banker’s striped shirt, you might wonder who, right now, would honestly want to arm erstwhile Masters of the Universe against their just desserts. But Miuccia was presumably using such menswear staples as symbols of Honest Joe Everyman. And it’s Honest Joe who is suffering. Maybe that’s why the patterns that decorated shirts evoked the thirties, another era of values-questioning social upheaval. Longtime Prada collaborator Frederic Sanchez's aural accompaniment incorporated Anne Clark, whose visionary combination of spoken word and techno sounded like dystopia's backing track. All in all, a stunning summation of the current jittery mood in fashion.This review was originally published onmen.style.comon January 18, 2009. It has been added to Vogue Runway in June 2021 as a part ofThe Lost Season.
11 June 2021
It’s been a year and a few days since Italy’s first COVID case was detected. Milan Fashion Week was in full swing when the outbreak in the Lombardy region began. Looking back, knowing now what we didn’t know then, is to see plenty of hand-wringing but probably not enough hand-washing. Fashion has done much hand-wringing for the last 12 months. Beyond the disastrous economics of the pandemic, there have been pressing, existential questions: How will a year at home affect what we want? Does fashion matter in a world bereft of social interactions?There are two brilliant fashion minds at Prada now, with Raf Simons having joined Miuccia Prada as co-creative director that fateful week a year ago. So there are few better places to look for answers now. As the director Lee Daniels put it in an online Q&A post-show, “Miuccia takes this shit very, very seriously.” (Daniels hired Prada to design the costumes worn by Andra Day in his new filmThe United States vs. Billie Holiday.)Adjusting to the idea that “normal” isn’t coming back took all of us longer than it probably should have. But whatever shape the world takes when we re-emerge, there’s a collective feeling of hope that’s new. At a small press conference after the Q&A Prada said, “optimism is mounting.” That’s a different take than she and Simons had a month ago in a similar situation following their fall 2021 men’s show. “We don’t feel it’s right, now, to be too exuberant,” Simons said then.You can credit this shift of mind to the vaccines, the inevitable brightening of moods as winter ends and spring begins, or the pleasures that Prada and Simons are finding in collaboration. “It feels natural,” Simons said of their partnership today. “At the same time, of course, it’s challenging, but I expected that. And I wanted it to be, otherwise I wouldn’t have come.” Together, these factors produced a collection with a tantalizing sense of glamour. It glimmered most clearly in the rectangular double-sided wraps—paillettes on one side, faux fur on the other—that models clutched to their breasts in a gesture “of protection, but also of elegance.” One such wrap was worn over a matching black paillette dress which itself was layered over the second-skin jacquard knits that appeared in many of the looks.In its endorsement of these foundational knits, the collection was a showcase for the key way the pandemic is changing fashion.
Ease is the flip side of elegance: In 2021, in contrast to the past, both are integral; and women seem unlikely to sacrifice the former for the latter. “Ease and movement were very important to us,” Simons confirmed. This is a positive development, especially because Prada and Simons were able to manage it while also reigniting a fashion spark that a year of online living has otherwise made dormant. A few of the compelling ways to celebrate our reemergence here included a drop-shoulder, puff-sleeve coat in electric yellow (a color the duo is staking a claim to), a chesterfield in midnight sequins, and a clutch coat in fake fur and the company’s regenerated Re-Nylon.
25 February 2021
“It’s a feelings thing… at the same time we were very attracted to not work in a narrative.” During the post-show student Q&A and then later on the Zoom press conference, both Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons emphasized that this collection’s design was intended to stir sensations rather than signal some storyline. That was one significant departure for this first co-creatively directed menswear collection authored by the two: in staging, setting, music, decoration and more, past Prada shows have often featured reverse-engineered clues and obliquely telling easter eggs that allow a reading to unfold.Today instead we saw a menswear collection dominated by a garment that acted as a single motif that could, depending on your feeling, be worn, felt and seen in multiple ways. That garment was a knit patterned long john. Above the foundation of the model wearing it, a long john was the cladding upon which every look in the show was constructed (although sometimes that look went unadorned, all-long john). No one long john was the same; the patterns were sometimes art deco, sometimes adapted argyle, sometimes something else. Necklines varied from turtle to V to polo to round; yarns and ply spanned mohair, fine-gauge, Shetland and more.Simons said: “We started talking very early on about what kind of piece could represent something very close to the body, literally being almost a representation of the body. We were looking for something that could be maybe a symbolic piece for all these kinds of feelings that we feel right now.” Their conclusion was what both designers called the “body piece” but which, Simons expanded, could be seen as a childish romper suit, or something more masculine like a long john. “Sexual cowboy in a saloon,” he said. (Prada later laughingly added that “cowboy” hadn’t been in her mental lookbook and that she saw the garment’s “rock ’n’ roll” relevance.)This ambiguity was the point of a garment you could feel different emotional perspectives about, which you would physically feel all over, and which would reveal the architecture of the body while also completely insulating it. Above this collection-wide foundation Prada and Simons built various satisfying superstructures. These included sleeve-hoiked suiting, sometimes in pinstripe (a former Mrs.
Prada no-no that Simons had charmed her into permitting), oversized re-nylon parkas with jacquard linings, similarly lined and rib-hemmed oversized bombers, topcoats in boucle, brushed teddy bear and diagonal wale, long john coordinated knit jackets, and high-collared, lapel-less peacoats. Some of the parkas and bombers featured Prada hardware logos at the top of the spine—a Margiela-expert acquaintance suggested this might be a hat tip—and many of the looks were accessorized by pandemic-perfect leather gloves featuring attached purselets. When not black or almost so, the color story played against the tones of a zingy faux fur interior that had been fashioned by Rem Koolhaas and AMO. The abundant tactility of this interior architecture spoke directly to that of the exterior architecture of those “body pieces”—textures designed to be felt both emotionally and physically.Some questions post-show were intended to reveal the texture of the designers’ own feelings, both about working collaboratively, and about working in this very particular now. Simons noted that despite intimations of a post-vaccine flowering ahead: “We don’t feel it’s right, now, to be too exuberant.” But, he added, “I do not feel limited in designing what we want to design.” Sitting at a responsible distance alongside him, Prada concurred: “Thank God we can keep doing what we like.”
17 January 2021
Following the thread of ourIn Vogue: The 1990s podcast,we are closing out the year and heading into the new one with a series of newly digitized archival shows from the decade that fashion can’t—and won’t—let go of. Prada’s fall 1996 ready-to-wear collection was presented on March 8, 1996, in Milan.The impact of Miuccia Prada’s “pretty-ugly” collection ofspring 1996, with its “off” colors (avocado, brown, ochre) and geometric patterns, both seemingly inspired by 1970s appliances and dishware, lasted for more than a season. According to reports at the time, so-called bad taste or anti-fashion was on the menu everywhere six months later. Prada included.The fall 1996 Prada show reads like a coda to the one that came before it. The palette was more somber; one might say autumnal. Navy, gray, and wine were balanced by brown, mustard, and lilac. Bold abstract motifs were back in a big way too.There was newness, observedVogue,in the long and slender silhouette; slim skirts hit below the knee, and there were cigarette pants in the mix. Ideologically, Prada’s fall and spring 1996 collections were in line with the tendency, noted by the magazine, of “every hip designer putting an ironic spin on classicism.”Are peacoats and cashmere sweaters fashion? Are “ugly” clothes anti-fashion? These were the kinds of questions journalists were posing, and Mrs. Prada kept them guessing. The fall show opened with a trad pantsuit, sweaters, and trousers, nothing to write home about, or…? The patterned pieces were certainly “editorial.” The mood was more sophisticated and “adult” than that of the spring show, until the finale of slip dresses. None of these had anyBUtterfield 8sizzle. Though some were rendered in a shade of lilac similar to that of the princess-line Prada dress Uma Thurman wore to the Oscars earlier in the year, the models didn’t project star power, but waif power.Though Prada revisited some of fall 1996’s distinct motifs in 2010 (much in advance of the late 2010s reissue fad, it should be noted), this collection is most memorable for its laddered knit tights and sell-out shoes: antiqued leather Mary Janes with stacked heels and floral appliques. They were either terribly pretty or pretty terrible, and as such they somehow managed in that inimitable Prada way to destabilize stereotypes and assumptions about propriety, class, gender, and beauty.
27 December 2020
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s new partnership is unprecedented in fashion. When it was announced last February, the industry reacted with surprise and delight. In the seven months since, nothing about it has proceeded according to formula. The coronavirus prevented the designers from setting to work on Simons’s appointed start day of April 1, which condensed the time they had to produce their debut. And ongoing regulations limiting group size and concerns about safety meant a splashy show at the Prada Fondazione was out of the question. Instead we all gathered in front of our screens today and watched a collection of 40 looks unfold on Prada.com. The usual backstage scrum afterward was replaced by “a conversation”—a sort of open-source interview in which Miuccia and Simons thoughtfully answered handpicked questions solicited on Instagram and submitted online. (IRL shows may return, but these two will never go back to reporters pressing iPhones in their faces again.)“It’s a beginning,” Miuccia declared when Duscher Tang from Shanghai asked, “Are you doing subtraction or addition?” However, the collection that preceded the interview was indeed a distillation of the new Prada as Miuccia and Simons see it, a paring back and streamlining of excesses to get at what’s essential. The show began with a sort of new Prada uniform, the building blocks of which are long, narrow, ’90s-ish trousers; a sleeveless, tunic-length tee with the famous triangle logo supersized and implanted below the neckline; and pointy-toed slingback kitten heels in a contrasting color. “How Miuccia dresses is very often a kind of uniform one way or another, and that was direct inspiration for me for the show,” Simons said in the interview.The collaborators both have a big thing for statement outerwear, and the many clutch coats peppered throughout the lineup in solids and florals nodded in both of their directions: The gesture looked simultaneously like Miuccia—see: any number of bow shots over the years—and like Simons’s moving swan song at Jil Sander circa 2012. Prada and Simons devotees will pore over this collection in search of references and callbacks.
They were certainly there if you looked: The “ugly prints” of Prada’s era-defining spring 1996 show reemerged on hoodies and matching full skirts (another new uniform, this one tailored to our new WFH reality), while the words and graphics silk-screened on pastel satin shift dresses linked this collection with two-plus decades of Simons’s personal work. The holey turtlenecks used as layering pieces throughout were a good idea lifted from his brief Calvin Klein foray.
24 September 2020
“As times become increasingly complex, clothes become straightforward, unostentatious, machines for living and tools for action and activity.” So said the press notes forThe Show That Never Happened,which was a digitally delivered group installation of five Prada-facing films by Willy Vanderperre, Juergen Teller, Joanna Piotrowska, Martine Syms, and Terence Nance. From the looks of it, they were all made at the Fondazione Prada, the edifice constructed to house not only the company’s extensive art collection, but also now used as the site of its healthy-season shows.A nice touch was that the films—which ran consecutively with the addition of a quick final walk at the end before Mrs. Prada’s usual fleeting, half-lateral bow—came to 11 minutes, the Platonic ideal duration of a live, actually there fashion show. Yet to compare the experience of a live Prada show (for those fortunate enough to go) with a product such as this is to compare theater to cinema.As directors of our experience, however, Prada’s collaborators delivered some diverting mise-en-scènes in which their sections of this pared-back Prada collection overlapped. First up, Vanderperre went for shivering violins over backlit, dynamic shift-focus shots of narrow tailoring silhouettes in black and white (a mild impediment to checking out the clothes, but atmospheric). Second out, Teller dug into the guts of the building to film and photograph a section that mixed full-skirted black nylon evening dresses against smocked workwear, plus more ascetic suiting played against sportswear. Whatever your platform, the high-hoiked white track pants and tucked-in tie and work shirt proposition was something to behold. To this watcher, all the finger clicking in Piotrowska’s chapter triggered a Pavlovian association more Paco Rabanne than Prada, but the industrial workwear—albeit via black and white—appeared soothingly institutional.Syms’s film stood out thanks to the interplay between the Marchesi-green upholstery of the Fondazione Prada’s cinema and the clothes that were filtered to match it. The meta-meta layering of screen-on-screen added an extra level of visual distance in which to greenly lean. And the sometimes collarless suiting, rib knits, and buttress-armed outerwear featured the fuss-free characteristics of the collection’s rhetoric.Finally to chapter five, shot by Nance in Piazza Adriano Olivetti, immediately behind the Fondazione.
Here the reflective layers of its three pools and mirrored surrounding buildings played a beguiling foil to Linea Rossa–labeled sportswear, lots of it white, seemingly tennis-y or sailing-y but also broadly not so sport-specific. Some of it was shot through a window onto the overlook that we’d all got stuck on before the first fall 2018 show at the Fondazione. An exploding moon and the ghostly survival blanket were disconcerting details that gnawed at the harp-calmed serenity of the whole.Usually chez Prada there is the tooth-and-claw ritual of the postshow debrief. Sometimes the throng seems close to swallowing Mrs. Prada whole. Today all she had to do was sign off in an email. In it she said: “I think that our job as fashion designers is to create clothes for people, that is the honesty of it. That is really the value of our job—to create beautiful, intelligent clothes. This season, we focused on that idea: It is about clothes, about giving value to pieces. The clothes are simple, but with the concept of simplicity as an antidote to useless complication. This is a moment that requires some seriousness, a moment to think and to reflect on things. What do we do, what is fashion for, what are we here for? What can fashion contribute to a community?”Simplicity can be complicated and complication can be simple. As Mrs. Prada and her peers work to anticipate how change alters the specifications of taste and clothes—a.k.a. “machines for living”—it will be fascinating to watch the architecture of fashion change too. Today’s complicated presentation of the simple seemed a strong starting point.
14 July 2020
“We can be strong and feminine at the same time…women carry the weight now.” Backstage tonight Miuccia Prada was insistent: Delicacy and frivolity are not antithetical to power. The spectacular necklaces and earrings the designer wore with a simple crewneck sweater and tapered silk pants as the fashion press crowded in to get their quotes drove her point home: She was bejeweled but in command.On the runway, Prada’s personal diamonds and precious gems were replaced by silk fringe and jet beads. These “clichés of femininity,” as she described them, accompanied pieces traditionally considered masculine. A boxy belted jacket was paired with a fringed skirt, while classic bib-front shirts were glammed up with skeins of crystals suspended from the shoulders. Basketball jerseys, another signifier of unbridled testosterone, got a similar treatment, elongated to the knee and then accessorized with yet more ropes of beads and sneaker-boot hybrids.Arguably, this “femininity equals strength” equation has been essential to Prada’s project all along. To her devotees, the Miuccia-isms we saw on this season’s runway—the jet beading, the embroidered car wash skirts, the sheer tulle layers, even the lotus-flower prints that she said nodded at the Viennese Secession movement—function as talismans. Or call them feminine armor. They confer confidence and act as badges of cool.As ever, Prada can be depended on to connect with our cultural moment, and to synthesize where women are at. But as obvious as all this sounds, outside the Pradasphere and our industry more generally, her theory of femininity is more problematic. Consider the remaining female Democratic candidates for the U.S. presidency, who have abdicated all interest in fashion. For what? Fear that it would be trivializing? That it would weaken their candidacies? Prada, for her part, sees glamour as “something that makes you optimistic, that lifts you up.” It’s tempting to wonder: If Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar thought like Prada, even in the slightest, where would they be now? Also, where’s Kamala Harris when you need her?The centerpiece of the show, which was staged in a recessed “plaza” built into the basement of the Fondazione Prada, was a representation of the Greek titan Atlas—a hero, not a heroine, who carries the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. There’s no small irony in that, of course.
In the gynarchy of the future these struggles over the liabilities of femininity will be moot—at long last! But in our present moment Miuccia Prada is the lone woman in a city of powerful designing men to have created her own vocabulary—to have modeled her own world. It’s a fact she ably demonstrated again tonight.
20 February 2020
As a swelling and ominous bass obscured heroic but fading trumpets the lights came up over a Prada set that closely resembled one of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings. There were two bare but Palladian-proportioned arched piazzas; in the middle of each was the statue of a man on a horse on a podium—classic 19th-century masculine heroism.Except, naturally, not quite. The horse and rider were constructed like those cardboard dinosaur statues for kids, from insertable, flat, anonymizing sections. Said Mrs. Prada in her post show debrief: “I wanted an equestrian statue, but of course equestrian is not politically correct, so I told Rem [Koolhaas], ‘Let’s do an equestrian that is totally non-heroic.’”Which allows us to canter on to the clothes. These were bookended between the bare-armed tank top looks at the top and high notch-collared two-button topcoats at the end: two particularly Prada-ish chapters in the recent masculine narrative of dress. Between them, even if Mrs. Prada indicated it wasn’t the intention, we seemed to take a survey of various professionally specific styles of dress seen through a house eye. There were young executives in three-piece suits or mismatched tailored separates, portfolios thrust between arm and hip, in different volumes of jacket. We transitioned to rural worker in mid-calf boots and oversized corduroy jacket, then onto a more urban kind of Prada hipster freelancer combination of the previous two categories that mixed elements from both and inserted some technical touches and piped sport raised graphics on pocket flaps. Two Macintosh-like rubberized coats matched with baggy pants tucked into beaten leather galvanized sole boots (plus rectangular lensed shades) were a little scientist-fights-contagion. Following those was an absolutely wicked green half-length coat that seemed particularly fashion show reviewer.De-formalized top-to-toe cotton day pajamas with small ruffled bibs and some great treated shearlings followed. We arrived at those last two topcoats via a series of knits and silks patterned with punchily-colored gridded graphics whose palette nodded to the earlier separates and seemed related to the lavender and olive shapes on the set. They also shared something with the (Google searched in the back of the car) fabric patterns associated with Koloman Moser and other artists of the Vienna Secession (mentioned in an aside by Mrs. Prada during the treasure hunt chat at the end).
“Let me say what’s the point of this show,” she obligingly added: “That in the big—not ‘confusion’—but thecomplicationof the current time between the world going wrong or going better, the discussion on sexes, on surviving or not… I thought to give an indication that the only thing that makes me calm and optimistic is to give value to work… to give value to things that matter in your life and your work. And so the creativity is mixed with technicalities, which is a little bit similar to the Secessionist period when ideas, creativity, and actual work had to be all together.” And going back to that post-triumphant equine statue, was this also about the nature of contemporary heroism? “Not heroic, but heroes… I want to give a hope that in thiscasino[translation: chaotic world] if you do well your job, paired with intelligence, and with culture, then this already is something… It’s to give respect to work, to effort, to fatigue, and to what is difficult.”
12 January 2020
At Prada, the beauty always lies in the details. Here are a few from this afternoon’s showing of the Spring/Summer 2020 women’s collection. The industrial hangar-like space in the Fondazione was striped with orange paint, the massive columns covered in gold foil, and the glossy floor hand-tiled in funky geometric patterns rendered in those deliberately naive off-pastels that, when thrown together, look fabulously sophisticated. It was nerdy and joyful, a mix of natural light and high gloss. And the same could be said for the eclectic and starry front row: here, Nicole Kidman; there, A$AP Rocky; and over yonder, Wes Anderson, whose museum show opens tomorrow night at the Prada complex, and who has long championed the sherbet hues. The first model out was Freja Beha Erichsen, the legendary cool girl of fashion so very Prada in her helplessly timeless hipness.From the get-go, this was the brand in familiar yet intriguing top form. And then there were the clothes: spare, elegant, a smidgen ’70s, a hint ’50s, unabashedly adorned yet beguiling for the esoteric gals among us. The core items include a tailored jacket, long of line, fabulous in double-face, with belt loops that suggest a waist without being insistent; a dress in cheesecloth, slightly transparent and possibly finished with gold sequin swirls or a necklace of enormous shells; a skirt, pencil or pleated or in embroidered leather, that bisects the shins and is sleek as hell; serious grey wool trousers with a hint of a flare; and summer knits in stripes, chevrons, and skinny cables to keep everything close to the body—vaguely artisanal and graphic yet soft. For lovers of Prada, this is the dream wardrobe: elegant, irreverent, unapologetically pretty, and devoid of conceptual gimmicks. What makes it fresh is how it is worn: Every look involves a mix of textures (macramé, straw, velvet, calf, patent, rope, bugle beads, paillettes) and context (a waft-y beach dress with a solid pump, an office suit with a macramé holiday bag, a silk cocktail dress with a whopping snakeskin platform).For Miuccia Prada, these juxtapositions mean everything for Spring. Her starting point for this collection was that “the person should be more important than the clothes,” and further, that “personal style is more important than clothes.” She was also hoping to make a point about simplicity, non-disposability, and “doing less.
” Timeless hipness is the goal here: Invest wisely in a few items and wear how you like, anywhere and with anything. Grab some shells and call them pearls. Glossiness abounds, even in dark times.
18 September 2019
“I am no longer an artist; I have become a work of art,” spoke a voiceover in the middle of Prada’s Spring 2020 men’s show, held, for the first time off home turf, in Shanghai. (Typically Miuccia Prada prefers to show her collections in the Fondazione Prada in Milan or at her New York office.) Later, the same voice said, “I feel myself a god.”Mrs. Prada has long maintained a reverent relationship with art, supporting and collaborating with her favorite creators, without ever formally declaring herself among their ranks—no word on the god situation. So, what were we to make of the statements pronounced, at techno speed, over a blue-lit runway at the Minsheng Art Wharf?To those at home in the Pradaverse, the words, lifted from Frankie Goes to Hollywood’sWelcome to the Pleasuredome, were Prada subversion at its best. In the show notes—unlike her in situ shows, Mrs. P did not assemble journalists for a debrief—the collection was described as one of optimism, suggesting that being hopeful can be an antidote for accepting the darkness of our actuality. It’s a continuation of the themes she launched at her recent women’s Resort show in New York, but when presented on male models, it took on a kinkier edge. The girlishness and sweetness of those paillette scarves and embroidered shirts were replaced with an almost erotic purity—the idea of fetishizing a thing as perfect as it is, unadorned in simple cotton or loose leather. The clothes were essentials in the most classic sense of menswear—twills, tweeds, shirting, sportswear, khaki—but oversize or misplaced in their proportion to reveal, say, a bare collarbone in a baby doll–ish tank, or to accentuate the strangeness of wearing a cropped jacket over a blazer in the same material. Together the looks comprised all the musts of a traditional male wardrobe, recut with the freewheeling spirit of boyhood.But a Prada show is never one note. The stated reason for this Shanghai show was to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Milan being named a sister city of the Chinese cosmopolis. The reality is that business in China is booming. Over two days of touring the city’s hubs, it was impossible to miss a Prada store or billboard. In reviving its Linea Rossa business, the company has struck gold with a younger, more streetwear-inclined consumer. Perhaps that’s what gave birth to a series of prints of antiquated technology.
A roll of film here, a cassette tape there, a ‘50s soda-pop joint milkshake later on—all of these pieces appeared as a single graphic or as a grid of many on trendy nylon. As the models walked past an audience clad in last season’s Frankenstein-patterned pieces, you could see the commercial appeal.To be sinister, or sales-minded, though, is not the larger message. Zoom all the way out—like, decades of menswear out—and this collection could read as a pivotal moment for Prada. For a long time, its menswear shows were about a medium-rise straight pant, a button-up polo shirt, and a loose anorak. Since hitting commercial success with pop-worthy printed camp shirts, Mrs. P has dared to design well beyond her menswear signatures, producing short-shorts and tightly belted blazers, and now loose tanks and shorts with zippers up the side seam. It’s a real treat to see her explore proportion and intention in menswear with the same pointedness she brings to her women’s shows. No wonder the guests in Shanghai went wild.
6 June 2019
Prada is destination number two of Resort season. The company’s West 52nd Street Piano Factory headquarters isn’t quite as exotic as Dior’s torchlit Marrakech idyll looked in pictures, but there were luminaries to spare in the front rows at tonight’s show: Uma Thurman and her teenage son in one section; Elle Fanning, Max Minghella, Diane Kruger, and Paul Dano in another; and aStranger Thingscontingent in a third.All that star power aside, this wasn’t a collection of glitz and glam. Miuccia Prada was in an understated frame of mind. Example numero uno was the spare double-breasted black coat that opened the show and the straightforward tailoring that followed it, devoid of any embellishments save for tattersall checks and minimal in the style of her ’90s heyday. As waiters emerged with trays of drinks and small plates—dinner was served after the show; there was a slew of international editors to feed—Mrs. Prada chatted thoughtfully. Real, naive, and “the opposite of pretentious” is how she described the collection. “It’s simplicity as a protest against too much. I’m sensitive to the political situation; it affects me.” That’s one reason she wanted to show “at home.”Her instinct this season was to work with cotton, a humble material put into sharp relief by the bronze duchesse satin pantsuit she wore to take her bow. There were peasant tops with smocking and handmade embroideries, striped button-downs in novel shapes, calico-print jackets and matching pants, and utility suits in solid pastels. Homey sack dresses were patch-worked from those stripes and calicos, and skirts were full and A-line—a silhouette familiar to Prada fans, but somehow more girlish in its proportions, perhaps due to the high-top sneakers worn with thick ribbed socks that many of the looks padded out on.The Prada show coincided with the opening day of New York’s Frieze art fair. An Alfredo Jaar piece spelling out “Teach us to outgrow our madness” in neon capitals made the rounds on Instagram. The dainty sturdiness of these clothes is likely to resonate with shoppers who are likewise turned off by the complexities and complications of our modern existence. Those who are simply in the mood for something pretty will find much to like here as well. Usually Mrs. P serves up her loveliness with a dash of provocation or a side of intrigue—something dark—but tonight pretty was enough. There was something refreshing about that.
3 May 2019
Five weeks ago Miuccia Prada presented a men’s collection that took as its starting point the story of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s monstrous, rejected, lovesick antihero. In that show Prada included a smattering of women’s looks from her Pre-Fall collection, as she is wont to do: utility-strapped and pocketed cocktail frocks, crystal-embroidered shirtdresses constrained by leather harnesses, combinations of graphic rose prints, wacky lightning bolts, and loose-gauge knits. In their quirky and bold juxtapositions of pedigrees, details, and textures, those clothes were indeed “Frankensteinish” and all the more compelling for it. (She also gave Gigi a feathery shag for the night, and boy did that spark a thousand snips!) Tonight Miuccia Prada continued her exploration of Shelley’s canonical invention, this time giving him a bride (literally, on a sheath dress worn by a bleached-browed Cara Delevingne) and positioning him at the center of a larger sociocultural critique of our times, which she feels are defined by “romance and fear.”First, one must note that it was a fearless decision on Prada’s part to show a women’s collection that did not come as a total surprise to its audience. There are many in fashion for whom the Prada show is like Christmas is to children who haven’t yet learned they can influence Santa: surprises abound! Why does the set have spiky foam floors? Why does the hair resemble Wednesday Addams’s? And who ever thought to record a violin cover of “Bad Romance”? Some people love Prada because they want to be gobsmacked, dazzled, schooled, and basically aesthetically woken up in the slumber that is Fashion Month. But those folks forget one thing: Miuccia is a serious person and one who is right now very concerned about European conflicts, wars, and the threat of war more generally. That is all she wanted to talk about postshow. And those sorts of thoughts and the creative impulses they give rise to don’t change in five weeks just because the industry prefers novelty. It’s simply not that moment.And so, instead, we had a Prada collection that continued to posit romance in all its aesthetic gestures (lace, flowers, hearts, fairy-tale capes, and glittery red shoes) as a way to both soften and deepen the tropes of utilitarianism (uniforms, puffers, cargo details, pole climber boots, backpacks).
The most successful looks had the subtlest integration of wide-eyed loveliness and lumbering dread: an off-the-shoulder party dress of rough, dry wool with a curvaceous skirt made shapelier with a massive patch pocket; a slouchy black trouser suit cinched at the waist with a vaguely mannish clasp; a compound military jacket with a nifty blue shirt and a black lace pencil skirt. For the Prada-philes among you, please note that the bags were largely framed purses, the shoes were mostly either massive and mannish or a sturdy pump in matte black or all-out sparkle, and the trendy buys probably involve 3-D flowers or pastel Muppet fur (cute in small doses).And Prada-philes will love this collection because it was, at its core, very, very Prada. Not because there were, as ever, many great swaggering coats. Not because the dresses nodded to a demented Kim Novak or an inscrutable Eva Marie Saint. Not because there was a shoe in balletic pink with a plexi-heel, or a thick-soled brothel creeper for one of those slushy-streets, death-of-sex dates. It was very Prada because it spoke so clearly to the twin impulses that both define and daunt the Prada woman: I know what really matters and I also really love fashion. Such a beautiful, bad romance.
21 February 2019
So the story goes,Frankensteinwas born one stormy summer’s night on Lake Geneva in 1816. Mary Godwin, her lover Percy Shelley, and their traveling companion Lord Byron decided to have a competition to see who could come up with the creepiest horror story. In a dream, Godwin imaginedFrankenstein: Even though she was just 18, her story was unanimously declared the winner. Two of the most feted poets of their age knew brilliance when they saw it.If there was a competition among fashion designers today, Miuccia Prada would, you’d wager, trounce the overwhelmingly male opposition.Tonight in the Fondazione she presented a monster of a collection—dark and alienated, but twistedly pretty too—that will have her acolytes stumbling, entranced, to the stores.Let’s hear the premise from Mrs. P—tonight’s true storyteller—herself: “Basically it had to be a romantic show. And mainly I was interested in the understanding of humanity: weakness and the more delicate and naked aspects of humanity also. The rejected . . . the one who doesn’t have a career. It was set against a very tough world—that is why war and military was in the air. But to make it not boring and for the fashion—because fashion has to be light somehow—we borrowed the symbols of trashy horror movies. FromFrankensteintoThe Rocky Horror Picture Showand all those movies.Frankensteinis the example of the monster with a big, big heart who searches for love.”That’s why Gigi Hadid was in a cutely pleated, crystal-studded gown that Janet Reiss would have relished. And why the models walked among 120 oversize light bulbs with helter-skelter elements glowing in the gloom. And why menswear shirting featured lightning bolts zigzagging to the heart, or the closing knitwear pieces—the Pradaphile trophies of the season—featured felt hearts attached by safety pin.Beneath the horror—the horror!—Prada was doing the time warp (again), to compelling effect. All in black or gray, the men’s suiting was classic boxy-shouldered, high-notch-lapelled house fare. Triple-belting distracted the eye, but was a styling detail. For women, the fitted, strapped off-shoulder silhouette, also classic to the house, was presented in its barest and hence possibly most versatile and desirable form. One strapless black dress featuring six billows pockets—a sort of field dress—was a fabulous contrast of distilled femininity and military.There were jackdaw, trophy-post asides in boldly colored marabou trimmings on hats and shoulders.
Many of the models were heaped with backpacks worn high on the back that pushed the sternum forward. Mrs. P was almost dismissive of this detail. She was much more interested in the origin story ofFrankensteinand Mary Godwin, who first released her yarn in 1818, anonymously. “This woman in the 19th century, she could not publish her book. She inventedFrankensteinbut the poet Shelley had to publish it . . . because they didn’t publish a book written by a woman.” At this Prada paused and assumed a satisfied expression: “Although it seems that in literature now, if you are not a woman you don’t sell. So men, now, they change their names into women’s names!”Or as Mary G herself wrote: “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
13 January 2019
The gasp factor at Prada’s show tonight was the vastness of the new multipurpose performance space at the Fondazione Prada she has opened. We sat on inflatable Verner Panton stools and took it all in: the stadium seating at one end; the cavernous hall; then the fact that the floor was marked out with grids of geographical coordinates denoting the exact place in the world each one of us was occupying. “We wanted to introduce life to the Fondazione, because sometimes art is not enough,” said Prada.Placing fashion on an equal footing with an art performance is a prerogative Miuccia Prada has always asserted. It puts people on the edge of their seats, straining to correctly perceive what this oracle of fashion will have to say about the state of the world. This time, her address seemed aimed directly to youth. There were cycling shorts and duchesse satin A-line tunics and baby doll dresses; plunging bodysuits with straps under the breasts; sheer black knee-highs implanted with Prada’s triangular logos; and iterations of her ’60s–’70s throwback print jersey ladylike coats, all of it topped off with puffy Alice bands. “I wanted to break the rules of the classic,” she said. “To discuss a wish of freedom and liberation and fantasy, and, on the other side, the extreme conservatism that is coming—the duality out there.”It’s no secret that a new generation of consumers is rising all over the world, and there’s a battle of the brands to win their attention. Never mention the wordmillennialto Miuccia Prada, however—as someone did in the press melee afterward. “I don’t like it when people assemble meaning around a term likemillennial,” she said. “It means somebody to sell things to. Young people are different kinds—they’re intelligent, they’re stupid, they’re cultivated, they’re not. I speak to people. What worries me,” she added, “is simplification. Because politics is run by slogans—or not even that, by a hashtag. If you take away content and simplify, at a certain point you can’t say anything.”For sure, this was a collection which defied neat taglines. In Prada’s head there may have been a war against incipient fascism going on, but her collection still had plenty to wear, like the double-breasted jackets, the tie-dye circle skirts, and cashmere sweaters with neat white shirt collars. And you wouldn’t need to be a schoolgirl to get away with them.
20 September 2018
A Prada show sometimes feels like an especially fiendish crossword puzzle that’s designed never to be solved. To get to something even approaching a suitable answer you need to navigate a whole tranche of clues, misdirections, and visual entendres.But that’s the game. The unknowability of Prada is one of the elements that so entrances its devotees. As Timothy Leary once said, “The universe is an intelligence test.” In Miuccia Prada’s universe, the test is to find the intelligence—the information—that leads you to a vaguely acceptable explanation.Tonight the trail of clues began with the setup. Prada’s double-vaulted industrial shell was stripped back and redolent with the fresh-rubber smell of a newly bought pool toy, thanks to the translucent sheeting that coated its walls and floor. The seating was reproductions of the inflatable footstool first produced in 1960 by Danish designer Verner Panton, whose “total environment” interiors look likeAustin Powerssets today, but were in their time powerfully psychedelic spaces.This nod to the 1960s (sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll!) prefaced the most urgent-to-the-eye decorations in this show: the powerfully ’60s florals near the end, the hand-drawn head-scape of flowers, clouds, and girls on a sweater towards the beginning, and the three printed and filtered collage looks—with short-shorts—in the middle. The music was Aphex Twin and Brian Eno, culminating with Air’s “Sexy Boy.” Okay . . . so was this Prada taking a trip to Sexytown? Backstage Mrs. Prada said she was hoping this season’s iteration of Prada man would be “elegant but in a young, new way.” Almost coyly, she did not disagree with the suggestion that sexiness was on the Prada palette. “You know I’m a bit contrarian. You know I never pronounce this word in my life: I never wanted to pronounce the wordsexy. But now, sexy. . . .”Aha! Maybe that was it! Prada loves to play with the ugly, and today—as Versace touched on, too—sexy is an ugly notion. Which makes it ripe for Prada-fication. So was Prada dosing us, taking us on a trip and urging us to turn on, tune in, drop out, and assess the subject afresh?Sexiness is subjective, of course, but there was a trad-masculine authority (if that’s what you’re into) in the cleanly cut single-vented colored blazers and seamed, washed jeans with a break.
There was also plenty of thigh (if that’s what you’re into) in the Daisy Duke denims (Davey Dukes?) and printed, striped, or plain short shorts which Prada might just have described as “miniskirts for men” (it was hard to hear in the backstage crush). There was a touch of femme (if that’s what you’re into) in the rubber-sheened ruffle-fronted shirts that were delivered towards the end.There was a gentle return to the logo-fication we’ve seen here in recent seasons, but with none of the heavy emphasis on sportswear. Instead there were sturdily unreconstructed rib-knit and leather half-zips, boat shoes,ushankasin house nylon or a weave in red and blue that translated to sneakers and a sweater, and a tailored silhouette that was ostentatiously un-emphasized. Every look—every single one of them—came with a bag slung across the right shoulder.Prada collections are drawn-out acts of fashion titillation, obfuscation, and veiled intent. As propositions go, tonight’s was almost bracingly direct: sexy boys in elusive clothes. And, like,wearable.
17 June 2018
Miuccia Prada staged her Resort 2019 show in the company’s Herzog and de Meuron–designed headquarters on West 52nd Street. The former piano factory’s nearest neighbor is Clinton Park Stables. Horseyodeurnotwithstanding, it was the glam-est address in all of Manhattan tonight with a guest list that set the bar high for the destination shows happening in the South of France later this month. There was so much star wattage Selena Gomez actually crashed.Prada rarely puts on events in New York, and after the show she cited the company’s long absence as one of the reasons she opted to do something in town. She’s also hosting a table at the Met Gala on Monday, so the timing was right.Time was a subtext of her excellent collection, touching as it did on some of the most iconic motifs of her career defining ‘90s shows. The “ugly prints” that captured and confounded audiences in equal measure; the kick flares slung from the narrow hips of Amber and Shalom; the so-gawky-they’re-good stacked-heel loafers and heavy-gauge tights. They all made reappearances here, updated with late-2010s signifiers like prominent logos and technical sport mesh. “Not too many words, it’s not a serious show,” Prada demurred to the crowd of reporters afterward, then summed it up neatly: “It’s a kind of fantasy of reality.”The reality is that in the Instagram age, when we have instant visual access to so much, archival collections are proving super popular with the millennials too young to have experienced them the first time around and the olds who’d like to relive their salad days, or at least fit into the clothes they wore two decades ago.There were nuances, of course. The athleisurely mix of sports jerseys and zip polos with paillette-strewn silk chiffon felt decidedly current, and the giant trapper hats that accessorized many of the looks couldn’t have come down the runway in the 1990s. Fashion is a lot noisier now, which fits the age. Indeed, the show’s geeky prints and Lurex-shot brocades will get photographed and turn up on red carpets. But the agenda-setting being done here was in the early series of spare, attenuated looks that combined simple knits with wispy ankle-length skirts or a slip dress, and understated tailored coats. In the face of so much muchness those four looks were a bold statement. Is the world ready for a return to minimalism? Who knows. But Miuccia Prada just got the ball rolling.
5 May 2018
It was kind of a mind fuck to go to Prada. There, ostensibly to view her women’s clothes for Fall, a couple of hundred people waited, crowding and jostling ever closer to an elevator at the new Rem Koolhaas extension to the Prada Foundation. It didn’t come. On reflection, this modern convenience was probably never going to arrive. It took a good 15 minutes for the social experiment to work, for despair to set in, after which there was a collective decision to walk up four floors. And there we took our seats at the edge of an abyss. A brain-fooling black-mirrored floor seemed to fall away to infinity in front of us. Straight ahead through plate glass windows was a dark cityscape illuminated by neon Prada signs—a cartoon flaming heeled shoe, bunches of bananas, a spider, a monkey, a dinosaur. Just before the show, a drone appeared, systematically hovering to record the show and audience reaction, from the outside in.Troubling, dystopian sci-fi experiences are the fashion sensation of the moment; the point of decadence where immersion in ideas seems to supersede or question the validity of the clothes. Prada’s seemed sketchily put together from hefty utilitarian layers of workwear and tulle, assembled entirely from man-made materials, starting with the company’s black Pocono-nylon padded rainwear.Glowing fluorescents and digital prints were contrasted with tweeds, squared-off parkas, and construction worker vests. Approximations of strapless cocktail dresses had corporate ID cards pinned to the breast. Rubber boots appropriated nylon drawstring leg-coverings. It was a disrupting picture of layered dissonances with a deliberately done-in-haste feel.What could it mean? Miuccia Prada posits fashion as a live commentary which is eternally suspended in the space between politics, sociology, and commerce, searching as it must for the relevant attractions which will make women buy in the moment. She joked with journalists that this show was her “little revenge on the art world, occupying the art space” that she herself will soon fill with the collections acquired by her own family’s Prada Foundation. Fashion, she argues, is just as serious an endeavor as contemporary art, even though it is routinely looked down upon by art world academics.
With this collection, she jolted her fashion audience into the realms of performance art; a feminist statement, mashing the bourgeois clothes of her brand signatures to produce a vision which she described as “for the strength of women going out in the violence. My dream,” she said, “is for women to be able to go out in the street and not be afraid. I wanted to have the freedom exaggerated.”For anyone who was there, it was a discomfortingly layered, unforgettable experience—that in itself is an achievement in a world of so much bland, unchallenging fashion. It also provokes questioning. The use of so many unsustainable man-made fabrics is a big one. In that, it mirrors the menswear collection Prada put out a few weeks ago. Art is art, but fashion is the bigger culprit in damaging the planet. How good it would be to see Miuccia Prada begin to turn her creative intelligence to that subject.
22 February 2018
The big bang that began Miuccia Prada’s propulsion of her family firm from heritage brand to definer of the cutting edge was her introduction in 1984 of a line of bags, purses, and backpacks in black, industrial-quality “Pocone” nylon—a refinement of a material only previously used in the luxury industry as packaging. This evening she returned to the material in a collection that was full of Prada-past references, repackaged anew in garments and accessories that should prove very compelling to customers.The venue was new—the “Prada Warehouse” adjoining its Fondazione on the southeastern outskirts of Milan. We walked into a logistics hub whose piled pallets of boxes in plywood and foil were stickered with fresh Prada logos—Instagram catnip—that either pointed to the past or were knowing jokes: handbag stencils with “this way up” arrows, the wordAdarp(worth a backwards glance), a Prada banana stamp.The first looks out were near total all-black Pocone: padded, un-quilted vests and jackets, shorts, long coats, loose pants, and skirts that emitted a synthetic rustle as they passed. Only the odd forearm clad in Prada-ized Fair Isle and the leather uppers of tough, molded-sole Chelsea boots leavened the nylon shine. Models wore ID tags featuring new Prada logos and cutout Polaroid head shots clipped to their clothes or bags. “I am in love with black nylon. I can’t have enough at the moment,” said Miuccia afterward. To help assuage that appetite she had recruited an impressive roster of codesigners—Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Konstantin Grcic, Herzog and De Meuron, and Rem Koolhaas—to create one-off interpretations of Pocone portage. Koolhaas came up with a “frontpack.” Herzog and De Meuron rustled up a bag printed with a jumble of letters because, as Prada explained, “They spoke about text and words being something from the past. Now they don’t represent any more ideas and content and concept, but are pure decoration.” Hmm. Words sure beat poured concrete and glass when it comes to communication, but fake news–wise, you sort of knew what they were getting at.Post-Pocone the looks veered into voluminous, painted patch-pocket overcoats and jackets in leather for both genders with workwear-style Prada tags at the breast pocket. Then, after a brief Pocone redux softened by black knitwear, the collection suddenly swiveled.
Bucket hats, padded shirts, and shorts printed with a mixed-up mishmash of past Prada prints—lipstick, banana, flames, and more—altered the atmosphere from monastic workwear to Hunter S. Thompson-esque casual extravagance. On men those Fair Isles still peeked from beneath short-sleeved shirt hems, while for women the equivalent were mid-arm crocodile gloves.Then another penultimate swerve, this one into Linea Rossa waters: padded minimalist sportswear/workwear featuring the red Prada Sport flash before a final exhale of soft tailoring, some overlaid with a matte, rubbery wash, hand-applied and irregular to create a double shadow on the garments.Afterward we gathered to hear Prada’s exegesis of the season. She said she had divided the collection into groups of “species” to “suggest that we are all controlled by machines of many kinds.” She gestured at the alt-Prada branded boxes towering around us and said, “Maybe in those cages there are strange mysteries, strange animals from the past.” Asked about the bigger picture—she always is—Prada observed: “We are living in a period which is interesting because we do not know where we are going. Of course scary, of course worrying, but also interesting because of the feeling that big changes are coming.” Shortly afterward, she added, “So many people say that beauty will save the world, but I don’t believe so. The world will be saved by intelligence and humanity and generosity—and possibly love. But of course the aesthetic world helps, a little.”
14 January 2018
The time has come to put away bourgeois, girly playthings and get militant. Miuccia Prada’s Spring collection was, she said, “interested in someone who can be active and present today.” In Prada’s mind, there is no equivocation about exactly what that means: “Just wanting to change the world. Especially for women, because there’s so much against us, still.” You knew what she was talking about—countermanding the forces that threaten to roll back women’s rights. Since the election of Donald Trump, the need has become urgent. Can fashion be an ally in that struggle, though? “I am suggesting militant women in a very practical way,” Prada said. “Through clothes, which is what I do.”It was an empowering show, set among the work of women cartoonists and manga artists whose drawings dominated the company’s huge headquarters. “They are mainly contemporary artists, but also some from the ’30s to the ’60s,” said Prada. “I found it inspiring that with a pencil in your hand, you can tell your life.” The collection was based on putting her stamp on a blank canvas. Coats, jackets, and cropped pants were screen-printed flat so that the creases showed—a rough-and-ready analogue process deliberately dating back to the time before digital printing came along to smooth out the human touch.The result felt strongly reminiscent of the feisty, do-it-yourself energy of early-’80s club and street style in London and New York, viewed through a Prada lens. For one thing, it was a terrific show of tailoring, from big overcoats with pushed-up sleeves to oversize jackets with lopped-off sleeves to slick plastic raincoats—and one example of the classic black nylon Prada raincoat. There were New Wave-y mash-ups of animal prints, cat-eye shades, zebra and leopard-spot prints, kitten-heel slingbacks, and pointy studded brogues.In the original, this kind of styling was all sourced in thrift shops. It was the language of girls who would take their scissors to old dad coats, chop up old dresses to wear over trousers, and decorate themselves with protest pins and gig souvenirs. The styling still read as distinctively on-brand Prada, what with the printed knee-socks, the designer’s penchant for shorts, patches of embellishment, and the appropriations of feminist art cartoons. The empowering part? These Prada riot girls were in sync with the “woke” generation’s sensibilities.
The one good thing that’s coming out of the terrible times we live in is that no one needs to preach politics to young people anymore. Even if they can’t afford to buy her stuff, it’s a good feeling to look to Ms. Prada and know she’s on their side.
21 September 2017
Comics both inspired and illustrated this collection, but there were no capes—just plenty of fine topcoats in herringbone, bird’s-eye, or plain camel and gray wool.Backstage afterwards, Miuccia Prada said that the central idea this season was “really that on one side is the virtual reality and on the other is the reality of the human part.” She is, she confessed, no avid reader of comic books (or graphic novels, as aficionados like to term them). Yet she was drawn to them as a decorative motif for her central thesis because: “They are hand-drawn, human, simple and real. Even if they contain of course all the worst fantasy, they look simple. . . . They are little fragments of life, which is what you get now from the information, the media: So I was more and more attracted by them. Even if I never liked them.”The audience was introduced to Prada’s graphic commissions as we walked into its vaulted Via Fogazzaro space. Panels by longtime house collaborator James Jean and Belgian graphic artist Ollie Schrauwen were painted over floor, wall, and roof. Even the outlines of the vaults were emphasized with comics-inspired black borders. “We asked them to do stories that wouldn’t be too superhero, but to push the human point,” said Mrs. Prada. The mishmash of panels included a shaven-headed male figure looking up at a cloudless suburban sky, a recurring space-helmeted simian firing some kind of laser beam from his eyes, a giant ant looming over a house, and a rushing locomotive.When the clothes came, it was to a soundtrack that started, stopped with a scratchy shudder, restarted, and then skipped to something else—a mix as fragmented as the collage of graphic images. The clothes too, were purposefully jumbled. Full-shouldered shirts in red or black nylon with sleeves pulled to the bicep then fixed with a Prada Velcro tab were worn, collar up, over similarly collar-popped bengal striped shirting. Oversized fanny packs were worn at the small of the back. Shoes at the beginning were similarly technical and Velcro-strapped, a cousin of the sportswear in Prada Resort, but quickly morphed into a rapidly changing medley of two-tone loafer, sandal, and old-school basketball-style sneaker. Pants were either wide and woolen, pulled high and secured with a narrow belt at the top, or tapered, narrowish, and nylon, secured with a Prada Velcro tag at the ankle.
Whether topped by cardigan, coat, jumpsuit, or shirt, there was always a litany of layering at the neckline—collars again mostly popped.
18 June 2017
Resort? Cruise? Or maybe neither of the above? The irony of Prada’s first fashion show dedicated to a season notionally spun around leisured travel was that it returned this house back to its home—its original place of work. This afternoon’s show was held in the Prada-owned eaves of Milan’s soaring, vaulted cathedral of consumption: the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, completed in 1877. It is the most beautiful shopping mall in the world. Almost directly below us—way, way below us—was the original store opened by Miuccia Prada’s grandfather Mario in 1913.Speaking afterwards Prada robustly rejected the Cruise/Resort tag as nothing but a flag of convenience: “I never wanted to write ‘cruise’… for me a show is a show... but they said it is better to understand so I said okay.” Yet she happily conceded that within the broader dialectic between which this collection swung—the industrial modernity and decorative abundance of the Belle Époque, a period neatly packaged by the construction of the Galleria and the opening of Prada—there were plenty of signature Prada-isms being played with too.The opening section returned us directly to the first commercial catalyst of Prada’s own belle epoque under the direction of Miuccia: the black nylon fabrication that helped propel the brand from heritage slumber to front-of-house fashionability. Here the nylon was not in backpacks or purses but iterations of sportswear (pants, blousons) volumized then cinched with velcro for house-requisite nonconformity.At first on clutches and handbags, and then across tufted and paillette-patterned tops, pants, and shift dresses came another Prada-past flashback. Returning collaborator James Jean provided sinuous illustrations of rabbits and lilies, which Prada said she had envisioned as a Liberty print. Deep-necklined overcoats, externally emphasized bralettes, high socks pulled up over wickedly proper shoes—some with heels designed to resemble inverted Eiffel towers--were a few other Prada tropes touched on. Ruffle-bibbed blouses and tightly pleated skirts in candy store pastels—apricot, violet, pink—were cut from an organza-like transparent Japanese fabric that showed the bodies and underwear within, and which often came framed by suspended arcs of metal pins or panels of interlinked grommets. The interplay of metal and transparency was echoed by the cast iron cupola of the Galleria in front of which the models walked.
Scallop or feather hemmed transparent dresses with pretty-pretty paillette detailing at the neckline were worn against miniskirts and socks stamped with corporate labels. Elsewhere socks with Art Deco-esque grids were worn below a transparent plissé skirt and slip—all beneath a stripe paneled wide-shoulder track top. This collection revelled in vacillating between aesthetic extravagance (feathered headdresses, tattoo curlicues of pattern, liquidly metal jewelry) and the apparently utilitarian (velcro strapped sneakers, the sportswear, a twisted black nylon trenchdress). It was a contradiction lingered upon like an itch slowly scratched for pleasure.Prada said that presenting a “modernist” collection was her primary aim. The space we were in is formally known as the “Osservatorio,” and was acquired by Fondazione Prada as an 10 euro per-entry arts space to complement its less central monumental headquarters. Within it, this collection made for a fine exhibit of Miuccia Prada’s ongoing pendulum—this one leaned on the pretty side—between her multiple poles of inspiration. And for those who could not recognize them, the black Prada label belt that cinched the waist of many of these looks acted as signature.
7 May 2017
Miuccia Prada is far too smart to mistake herself for a politician. “I don’t want to be political. Not officially political. When people ask that, I say no; in my work, I am not in the right position,” she said that backstage, her eyes glinting and her shoulders rising in a huge Italian shrug. But then she laughed conspiratorially: “I have to . . .sneakit in.” Let the decoding and deciphering of her Prada-sphere rest here a moment. One look at the pictures, and it’s plain to see: For all its complexity, Fall 2017 is a quintessentially multicolored, ostrich-feathered, crystal-fringed Prada humdinger of a collection.It started somewhere in the late ’60s, early ’70s, perhaps, with hip corduroy flares, hand-knitted scarves, Baker Boy hats and patchwork leather and snakeskin coats. It moved on through all the curvy sex-bomb tropes of the ’50s, in a fuzzy, embroidered-angora sweater girl kind of way—who better than Lindsey Wixson to sashay a tight, red, in-and-out cocktail number with a whoosh in the hem? Turquoise and coral ostrich feather flew on hemlines; crystal fringing swished from flesh-colored lingerie nylon. And, this being Prada, there were coats all the while. Tweed-checked utilitarian ones; the fully print-and-fur elaborate ones. In other words, precisely how Miuccia Prada dresses.Then it sank in: Was this some kind of autobiography—a reflection on how far she, Miuccia Prada, has come since she was a student, a girl who was about to get wrapped up for a time in the left-wing Italian politics of the ’70s? In the roiling chaos of the backstage interview, Prada made a remark about hearing an “old feminist” who said something to the effect of “Here we are again.” Not hard to relate that to the image of the American woman whose recently written placard has gone viral.I can’t believe I still have to protest this fucking shit.We all recognize that, don’t we?In Prada’s space, the immersive environment she creates every season out of her industrial headquarters, she prepares her audience by stealth. This season’s scenario, she said, was triggered by the Federico Fellini movie,City of Women. “But not the content, just the title.” So there were pretend-movie posters—and illustrated pinups of ’50s and ’60s femmes fatales on the walls. Lower down, where the audience groped its way to its seats in the dark, there was a set evoking a teenage dorm to sit amongst.
23 February 2017
The pilgrims who travel to the temple of Prada come to witness the revelation of big ideas: eurekas that push fashion forward. Or an intuitive aesthetic strangeness that immediately makes that which preceded it seem trifling. Tonight the big idea was not to be big.Despite the assertive cult dedicated to the exegesis of Miuccia Prada’s output, she knows herself best. Backstage, she said: “My inspirations are so many and so complex that to summarize is impossible. But I would say that the main sentiment that I had is going from bigness to smallness; from the big deal of the installation—big architecture and construction—the big deal of fashion, the big deal of art, the big deal of everything. And to go opposite. More human, more simple, more real . . . the desire for reality, humanity, and simpleness.”Simplicity sandwiched this show. The top was an assertively normcore assembly of button-down shirt, V-neck sweater, wide-gauge beige corduroy pant, and some suede-paneled round-toed shoes. The last was a boot-cut beige corduroy suit, worn with tie, which featured leather panels on its pockets. In between came exercises in what she said were a conscious exploration of “crudeness” and “low art”: highly researched to be banal watercolor scenes on knitwear; futuristic by-numbers collages on women’s handbags. There was also a search for the analogue. Mrs. Prada half-joked that she had gone into the woods to find the twigs inserted into feathered chains, which along with shells provided naively totemic jewelry accents. She said the interplay of corduroy and leather encapsulated the collection, and there was for sure plenty of both; shades of brown leather in pants and topcoats and corduroy used in jackets and suits for women. The provider of oddness, over and over, was fur: on colored studded boots, the belt in the first look, as panels on the front of pimpyStarsky and Hutch-style outerwear. Mrs. Prada conceded the ’70s had ended up a heavy flavor here, but she insisted it was inadvertently done, even if it was a period she was attached to for its history of uprising and protest. The women’s looks, when not aping off the men’s, were more demonstratively decorative—but again as an exercise in the banal. The florals were quintessential Prada, and she laughed at them for it.The big, she had said, was represented by the scale of the setting here.
Collaborators OMA had bedecked the room as a soullessly attractive mid-century rehab center meets motel: all curving Qantas lounge wooden partitions walled by tiles or flecked marble, and intermittently furnished with leather sheeted beds. Pipe organ vied with harpsichord over heartbeat bass as the models walked, a soundtrack to uncertainty. Very laudably, Mrs. Prada berated the pollution of stimulation by information that now assails us all, saying: “We all went too far to the point that there is so much to follow, so much to do—always more and more and more. You lose somehow your normal nature.” Yet whether that overload can be quelled by feeding it with less is debatable. Despite the simplicity and the smallness and the intimacy she expressed a desire for here, the room was a sea of smartphones at the finale. It’s too late to stop now.
15 January 2017
Given what’s going on in the world, the constant bombardment of bad and terrifying news we’re surrounded with, what role should fashion play in our lives? When it boils down to it, that’s the crucial question every seller of fashion is facing now, from recent graduates to giant clothing behemoths.Miuccia Prada’s reaction, this season, was to simplify, declutter, and de-intellectualize. Or so she said: “Instead of exploring the history of women, which I have for a while, I decided to take care of now, the present, and trying to find elegance.”These were her words after a show that in some ways did strip back brandPradato its innovative, recognizable foundations. The girl in the black tank T-shirt and black knee-length box-pleated kilt who came out at the beginning was a clear reminder of the ’90s minimalism of which the Prada techno-stretch uniform set the pace. But this wasn’t like a literal retrospective at all. There were many reminders of Prada’s taste down the years, like her permanent passion for a ’20s or ’30s Deco-graphic print on a lovely fit-and-flare midi dress, and her abiding obsession with tiny knickers—this time of the high-waist type the 1940s star Betty Grable would’ve recognized.Still, what really stood out were Prada’s madly extravagant miles of ostrich and marabou trimmings on stoles, smothering envelope bags, fluffing up necklines and sprouting, Dr. Seuss–like, from sandals. Eventually, they got married up with the wonderful things in the show—palest beige-color lemony wrap skirts and dresses, chinoiserie pajamas, and stately wrapped coats, some sparkled with diamanté.Is this a suitable, appropriate fashion response to some of the direst circumstances humanity has faced in half a century? Well, maybe. WhenChristopher Kaneused liberal ostrich trimmings in hisFall 2016 collection, he framed it as a sign of madness. Fashion can distract from awful times with fluff, and that’s okay. Sometimes we crave that much more than the same old useful things. Emotionally, Miuccia Prada knows how to play that duality all the way.
22 September 2016
Miuccia Pradahas often been fascinated with otherness, with the idea of the different, the alien, the unfamiliar. A curiosity informs her work—a curiosity about people. How they live, what they like, what they may want to wear. It’s not always the foundation of her collections, but it is telling that after a Fall show obsessed with the vagabond and the voyager, Prada returned to travel as her theme for Spring 2017.That in itself is worth remarking upon. Prada is the queen of the volte-face, after all, wiping the slate clean and reinventing herself, her clothes, sometimes even her label, season after season. For Prada to riff on an idea for two consecutive exits means there’s something deep and meaningful going on. And of course, there is: Migrants are still fleeing war-torn Syria for the European Union, with governments and countries showing deep rifts in their varying responses to a crisis that shows no signs of abating. It was happening in January; it’s continuing today. Prada is reacting to the time in which she is living. “The past is over,” she said backstage—perhaps alluding to the poignant, poetic, and period response of that Fall collection. “I only want to think about the present.”It’s tough, sometimes, to ally fashion with themes like these without falling into the trap of a patronizing high fashion rehash—Zoolanderwithout the punchline. Nevertheless, fashion has a duty to be a testament to the time in which it is created. And these are troubled, uncertain times—even for Prada, whose turnover has been buffeted by the uncertain global economic situation. This season, Prada’s travelers were marching along a slanted incline—an uphill struggle—to their ultimate goal. And they seemed to be carrying the world on their shoulders, via backpacks bulging with clothes and dangling a pristine pair of brogues. That was a template for every look, a silhouette of skinny trousers—occasionally supplanted by leggings—and slender torso, with a hulking bulk in back.The Prada nylon backpack is the foundation of the label’s success. Its launch in 1984 catapulted the Prada label from staid Italian luggage manufacturer to the name that set the fashion pulse, resetting the notion of luxury, subverting the idea of status. It was, above all else, utilitarian. And that’s emerging as an underlying theme of the Spring 2017 season. Miuccia Prada not only staked her claim, but underlined her role in inventing it as a postmodern fashion concept.
19 June 2016
She is “a vagabond”—a woman who might be out traveling the world, or may be going on a trip somewhere deep within herself, or is perhaps making an even deeper pilgrimage into the labyrinth of women’s history. Anyway: Take it as read that the intent ofMiuccia Prada’s Fallcollectionis as layered as the clothes she showed, in a purpose-built, almost medieval marketplace of a wooden set. “We need to understand who we are today,” Prada declared afterward, surrounded by a three-deep crowd of female journalists. “Everything is symbolic. It is like a collage of what is happy or painful, of whether you are feeling beautiful or horrible, when you have love or no love. I thought of it as like someone who has all the clothes she’s ever had on the floor in front of her in the morning, and she must choose how she’s going to assemble herself.” In show notes, Prada put it succinctly: “The nature of women is complex and ineffable . . . Like a Russian doll placed inside one another.”And then, as she broke away, she made another telling remark: “I feel more and more, as I get older, that it is my responsibility to teach.” Looking closely, there were leather-bound books, studded with gold stars and moons, hanging from necklaces and bags. What were they? Recipes for spells, secret notes containing the age-old folk wisdom of women?Prada has often said that fashion’s ability to contain and refract multiple meanings beats many other cultural endeavors for its intelligence. But what is she teaching us on the primary level of what to wear or how to dress this season? Oh, lots! That a big tailored jacket with dropped shoulders and sleeves covered in fur is something you might feel like wearing with argyle tights and high heels—if you have the legs. That full ’50s-style skirts and dresses in rich gilded cloque silk look just as good—and that you could wear multiple belts buckled on top. That utility outdoorwear—something like nylon and quilted jacket liners—and trekking boots should be part of the everywoman picture, just as much as midnight blue or dark brown velvet ’40s-style cocktail dresses, with draped Hollywood sleeves and gold embroidery. That you might want a distressed leather pencil skirt. That bottle green ankle-strap velvet wedges are a definite. And that when the fleet comes in, you might want to pinch that sailor’s cap . . .
25 February 2016
Currently, affairs are tumultuous, to say the least. International markets stumble; European borders slam closed; turmoil bubbles. It’s foolish to think fashion exists in an isolated cocoon, or an ivory tower, ignoring the world outside its rarefied sphere. At base, it’s foolish because these things—economic sanctions, falling stock, stymied global movement—affect the buying patterns of even the world’s richest. No one is wealthy enough to be insulated from the rest of humanity. On another level, an intelligent, intuitive fashion designer naturally seeks to make work that represents the time in which they live, and contributes to a wider cultural landscape. They’re part of the conversation of their times. What touches more people than the clothing on their backs?That’s howMiuccia Pradaoperates. For one of the most willful, singularly talented, and individualistic designers working in fashion today, her output is marked not by her own whims but by a curiosity about other people, about the world she lives and works in. “That is what is really interesting,” says she. “What people relate to, what fascinates them, how the fusion of fashion and culture makes people react.” Miuccia Prada’s clothing is interesting because, at the end, she is interested in life, in her times, and in representing that through clothing.Pradastaged her Fall 2016 show in a complex, multilevel set designed to evoke, she said, “a square for ceremony—a gathering of the rich, the poor.” The ceremony she referenced was the “auto-da-fé,” the Spanish Inquisition’s public sentencing of heretics. It’s tempting to compare that to a designer’s experience of showing their work to critical masses, but Mrs. Prada had bigger fish to fry and larger concepts to engage with. “Immigration, famine, assassination, pessimism,” were words she threw out backstage, terms you seldom hear uttered in association with luxury clothing. Then, she grinned. “But I’m not a pessimist!”She is, however, plugged in to the troubled times around her, and she allows them to influence her clothes. It’s how she elevates them above the masses of garments created by other designers, and ensures they say something significant and distinctive. For Fall, said clothes were torn, bedraggled, wrenched away from the body in a state of disarray, a visual representation of the uncertainty of the contemporary. Today is what interests Mrs. Prada, despite her frequent references to the past.
(The latter were plentiful, in worn and aged fabrics, creased and mis-buttoned cotton shirting, battered canvas twill, knits fraying to yarn.) “It’s an excursion through history,” said Prada, surrounded by a set that collided classical colonnades with Ikea-y plywood, “connecting what’s happening now with what happened in history—to see if there’s anything we can learn.”
17 January 2016
Subverting traditional classics: That was the line transmitted about the Prada collection by design directorFabio Zambernardibackstage in the absence ofMiuccia Prada, who was sadly unable to be there this season due to the passing of her aunt. If Miuccia was elsewhere, her aesthetic was fully present in a collection which literally stayed within narrow lines. It was an essay on skirt suits and coats, bisected with a graphic theme of vertical stripes, and accompanied by a wealth of her quirky accessories, signature embellishments and the swish of dozens of dangly earrings as big as Christmas-tree baubles.The news from Milan so far has been about retro-eclecticism drawn through an Italian sensibility. Well, if anyone is the mother of all that, it's Miuccia Prada, who has been writing the encyclopedia on it, with PhD-level footnotes and wittily allusive fashion-changing asides, for decades. This collection trod firmly on her home territory, shod in an array of elegant low-heeled shoes, each pair made in its own delicious configuration of pointiness, ankle-strapping, metallic leather, patent and suede.As for the suits, they came in collages of checks, tweeds, and stripes, sometimes in leather and suede, here and there in transparent prints. What to make of this? For one thing, Miuccia Prada pays no heed to weather-appropriateness. In her view—which is a global one—there’s as much need for pieced fur coats in summer as there is for skimpy silk slip dresses, which she optionally layers over chunky knits. There’s the question of proportions, too—her loosened shoulder line and boxy shapes, and a series of waist-length jackets in brown suede and leather, could well prove influential.The show ended with a siren call to Prada’s wealthiest constituencies: coats in metallic snakeskin and suede stripes, and beautifully desirable organza suits and coats decorated with outsize transparent pailletted flowers. One way or another, all those looks are destined to be broken down and distributed as trophies all over the realms of young Hollywood, the art world, weddings, and special occasions that Miuccia Prada knows so well.
24 September 2015
Miuccia Prada has hardly done her male clientele a service by showing her Spring collection for men alongside her Resort collection for women. "Women beat men to zero," she conceded cheerfully after her latest exercise in a catwalk marriage of the genders. But, with this show at least, Mrs. P. added some perverse new shadings to the relationship between men and women in her universe.We take it for granted that women rule. Here, there was scrupulous attention paid to the details of their presentation, the cat-eye makeup and kitten heel with a sock instantly transporting us back to Chicklette and Concetta, John Waters' icons of bad-girl defiance from his 1974 work of genius,Female Trouble.These troublemakers have made their presence felt in Miuccia's world more than once. Today, the niceties of their early-'60s wardrobe—skirts pleated and pencil, sweaters second-skin and striped, mini shifts a-go-go—were extravagantly translated in leather and snakeskin. Gorgeous coats covered in paillettes, a waiting list candidate if ever there was one, suggested that a life of crime pays plenty well. But—here's where it got really perverse—these women were cast as almost maternal in comparison to the boys that Prada paraded.In their topstitched shorts and little zipped mock turtles and shirts part-tucked in, the boys were kids in a hurry. They had racing cars and rocket ships and Energizer Bunnies on their sweaters, a different kind of go-go from the girls. Mrs. Prada insisted she has never liked the notion of expressing an idea on a shirt. Symbols make her nervous. So she deliberately opted for the innocent iconography of boyhood. Except there is never really innocence with Prada, a point she reinforced by using the same racing cars and rocket ships on her womenswear. There was a very Big Brother eye here. You are being watched. There are no secrets. For that matter, cutting a boy's short shorts out of leather also underscored the impossibility of innocence.Regular visitors to Style.com know the pleasure we derive from analyzing the very particular food and drink Prada serves at every show. Today's ice lollies and whipped Pecorino suggested seaside family treats. The Negronis, on the other hand, were boozy adulthood. All Miuccia Prada has to do is put it out there. Now you make as much of it as you will.
21 June 2015
Pale green and pale pink drinks, pale green and pale pink canapés, pale green and pale pink walls…you got the memo before the first look hit the catwalk. After a men's show that was black as black, Prada went pastel for Fall. "Sweet…," said Miuccia, "but violent. I wanted impact. How can you be strong with pastels?" The answer was to drench them in irony.She had a couple of working titles for her new collection. "Softer pop" was self-explanatory, a riff on the color palette. But "variation on beauty" touched on a longtime fascination of Miuccia's: the relationship between the real and the fake. Is beauty created by genetic modification or surgical intervention any less "real" than natural beauty? This show set out to address that issue from both ends of the spectrum. Some of the most appealing items in the collection were cut from ostrich, but equally, a molecular print that harked back to Prada's good-/bad-taste glory days was actually an image of genetically modified ostrich. Tweeds came woven and printed. Music from Walt Disney'sFantasiaplayed, as a reminder that images of extreme beauty can spring from absolute artifice. In fact, there was something a bit cartoonish about the pieces cut from a hyper-smooth, spongy sci-fi fabric that most of us took for neoprene. It was actually a double-faced jersey. "I could do things with that fabric I couldn't do with another fabric," Miuccia enthused.One thing she could definitely do was challenge convention in the sly, subversive way that has always been one of the most forceful arguments for Prada's influence. The influence may have waned a little of late—sales have been off—but this show unfolded with the growing sensation that Miuccia was playing once more to her strengths, especially her ability to evoke, then upend, the familiar. What first made her famous, in other words. Opera gloves and fur stoles, brooches and bows, ponytails and kitten heels, Empire lines and pantsuits painted a picture of a Nixon-era debutante. The fact that the stole was abstracted into an attached strip of fur, or the brooches were cut from Perspex, or the gloves were all colors of leather, or the dresses and suits were molded from that peculiar fabric all added up to Prada's Factor X, the acid Miuccia added to her pastel punch. We tripped.
26 February 2015
Miuccia Prada did something she'd never done before with her show tonight. On every seat there was a printed manifesto for the collection—or, rather,collections. (She was showing both Fall menswear and Pre-Fall womenswear.) "Gender is a context and context is often gendered," read the notes. There could scarcely be a timelier idea to address, what with vigorous new debates about feminism, the heightened profile of LGBT activism, and the misogyny of religious fundamentalists around the world. And, in outlining her rationale for the show, it was clear that Mrs. P wasn't prepared to leave it as open to freestyling interpretation as she has in the past.And yet she couldn't help but excite conjecture. The invitation—a rectangle of black nylon—was a reminder of Miuccia's foundation in the family business, and she went back to the well with an opening passage of pieces cut from the material. She claimed that blending collections for men and women was something she'd been waiting to do for a while, because working on menswear always left her wondering how she could apply the same ideas to women. The shared aesthetic today was simple. "Uniform, severe, elegant: This is the fashion I like at this moment."It was industrial, too—not just that black nylon, but a stark, metal-floored, metal-ceilinged set; Frédéric Sanchez's soundtrack of Front 242; and the grim, urgent mien of the models. The boys might have been refugees from Madchester; the bouffanted, eyelinered girls could have been fleeing Le Lipstique, Baltimore's finest beauty parlor. Either way, as a manifestation of Prada's ongoing "analysis of the relationship between men and women" (thank you, manifesto), their presence together on the catwalk implied profound alienation, even with shared style tropes such as strictly belted waists and double-breasted closings. Gender as a context, indeed. Maybe it's always been that way with Miuccia. She presents men as compromised boys, whereas women have been paraded as paragons of strength. Today, she whipped the epaulets off her male models' shoulders and repositioned them as decorative bows on the dresses of her women.But even that flourish was deeply ironic. "A bow wraps a present," Miuccia mused. "Am I presenting woman as object?" It is typical of Prada that, after taking in a collection that wasn't as stellar as some in the label's longtime roster of winners, you still walked away with such a thought-provoking, destabilizing notion lodged firmly in your mind.
18 January 2015
AMO, the company that designs the sets for Prada's shows, has created some special effects in the past. In June, the show space was transformed into a huge swimming pool as a backdrop for the Spring menswear collection. Today, the women's turn, the expanse of water had been replaced by eerie dunes made of lilac sand. Limpid water to dry sand—a process suggestive of catastrophe.There were other clues. The collections shared certain characteristics—a lot of topstitching, a lot of coats—but Miuccia Prada's menswear show settled for conservatism to the point where it was singled out as emblematic of normcore. And Mrs. P wasn't going to like that much. So if at first glance her new women's looks were still bourgeois-proper—A-line coats with three-quarter sleeves, belted coatdresses, shapely skirts to the knee paired with little sweaters, all things she's done before—that late "normality" had actually been unhinged, perhaps by the disaster that turned water to sand. It's the kind of willful twist she pulls off better than anyone else.Imagine a woman escaping into those purple-shaded dunes with the few scraps of her old life she could carry (including her platform clogs), then hanging on to those mementos and mending them lovingly. Clothes were pieced together, seams marked out for sewing, roughly picked out in topstitching, held together by leather and the occasional strip of brocade. Hems trailed threads; stuffing burst from pockets. Clothes that might have been rich in a former life were now beautiful fragments. There was a definite tug between rich and poor, not just in the collaging of gilded fabrics and humbler stuff, but in the way one neckline was threaded with diamonds, another defined by plain dark contrast stitching. (At Prada, even the canapés served before the show act as clues to the essence of each new collection, and here they included a square of chocolate on dry bread, which could pass as a poor man's candy bar.)"I wanted to revive the beauty of incredible fabrics," said Miuccia, but almost in the next breath, she revealed how conflicted her relationship with beauty is. For the umpteenth time, she said beauty was "an impossibility." And, yet again, she showed how a seductive new kind of dark beauty could be literally pieced together from ingredients as unpromising as scraps of brocade and raw cotton. Maybe that's what she meant when she talked about "a confrontation with antiquity," in which the old would be made new.
And you couldreallysee the make of these clothes.And though it might have been a little bit due to Frédéric Sanchez's extraordinary electric firestorm of a soundtrack—which closed with an ardent exhortation to "kiss me, kiss me, kiss me"—in the end you couldreallyfeel their passion, too.
18 September 2014
His and hers. Equality. At heart, a strong political statement, but that was too specific for Miuccia Prada when she was reflecting on the collection she presented tonight. Her logic was more personal. "Anytime I do a men's show, I'm thinking this would be fantastic for women—or at least for me. And more and more, it feels instinctively right to translate the same idea for both genders," she said. Not unisex, mind you. That's not a word Ms. P. is partial to, though she hasn't found one to take its place. And it may have been a bridge too far to seek an answer in Frederic Sanchez's soundtrack. He used music from Psychic TV, whose frontman, Genesis P-Orridge, spent years with his wife, Lady Jaye, undergoing cosmetic surgery so they could become gender-neutral human beings who looked like each other. Pandrogeny, that's called.But maybe the measured performance Prada staged—against a set of a huge, limpid blue swimming pool, ironic symbol of summer—didn't really need that kind of definition. It spoke for itself in its restraint and peculiar dignity. "When you do a women's show, it's never enough," she said, suggesting that it was a relief to work on something more realistic. There were clues, as usual, in the hors d'oeuvres the audience was served: vol-au-vent, Russian salad, shrimp puffs—fiercely untrendy finger food from a more conservative time.Conservativebeing a loaded word, Prada preferredproper.And that certainly worked for these grave boys and girls in their matching outfits. Some pieces were topstitched to emphasize their classic shapes: neat little jackets, jeans, boxy skirts. Otherwise, it was shirts and sweaters, with statement topcoats in leather. As overt as the collection got was a handful of pleated party dresses decorated with strips of glittering beads, but even those were sober enough for an audience with the Pope.Right now at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, there is a conceptual exhibition calledArt or Sound,which Prada describes as "a protest against uselessness and exaggeration" in the art world. It's no stretch to imagine that therealnessin tonight's show was her fashion equivalent.
21 June 2014
A handout at the Prada presentation tonight equated a fashion show with a theatrical performance: characters, space, costumes, music, and lights creating an enveloping experience. The small, square invitation sealed the deal, summoning us to "Act 2," the first act being the men's show in January, for which Miuccia Prada claimed inspiration from Germany's cultural avant-garde, in particular choreographer Pina Bausch, artist Joseph Beuys, and director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Then, the set was a stark alternative-performance space à la Bausch, encased in felt à la Beuys, and the collection's impact was low-key and obtuse. Now, just over a month later, the set remained exactly the same, but Miuccia had honed the inspiration, focusing on Fassbinder, watching all his movies to the point where she was prepared to announce that she had drawn directly from the costumes in his 1972 filmThe Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant."Your culture is done by your past," she said. "History is there for a reason."Miuccia and Fassbinder, who died in 1982, were more or less of the same generation and were shaped by the same social and political forces, so it was easy to see the appeal of the director for the designer. "His humanity, his love of culture, his love of telling a story," she enthused. "I had so much fun watching all those movies. They gave me a relationship with something less fancy, more dark." That clarified her new collection's obsession with shearling. "The opposite of rich," Miuccia called it, even though, given the volumes and extravagant shades she used, it was anything but poor. She laid it over sheer dresses, the tough and the delicate together, a longtime Prada obsession.But there was another facet of Fassbinder's creativity that infiltrated this Prada collection to great effect.Petra von Kantconnected Miuccia with an old Cecil B. DeMille version ofCleopatra,starring Claudette Colbert, which she became convinced had been a huge influence on Fassbinder. And that got her thinking about the continuities of creativity that run through culture (DeMille begetting Fassbinder begetting Almodóvar, for instance). Staying in tune with the German avant-garde subtext for a minute, the strong 1920s/1930s strand in Miuccia's new designs—the slink of sheer shifts, the Art Deco prints, the Deco-influenced silver tracery, the chevron necklines, theMetropoliswedge heels—evoked the Weimar era, where avant-gardism exploded over ground.
Dietrich's Lola inThe Blue Angelwas an icon of Weimar. Fassbinder updated her in his own 1982 movie,Lola.Tonight Barbara Sukowa, the star of that film, was performing live with strings, wind instruments, and the soundscapes of Frederic Sanchez. What was she singing? The songs of Kurt Weill, the genius composer of Weimar.The perfect circularity of the whole presentation was an exact embodiment of Miuccia's own fascination with the way that ideas roll forward through the ages, finding new life and new modes of expression. Clothes as ambassadors for ideas? That is more than enough to be going on with as you flick through the racks in a Prada store next fall.
19 February 2014
After a few seasons of offering conclusive proof that you can make movies with fashion, it was inevitable that Miuccia Prada would eventually turn her attention elsewhere. Where that might be was initially suggested tonight by the latest in an endless string of reconfigurations of the Prada show space. It was transformed into an industrial performance arena, with stalls, mezzanine, and orchestra pit. But it took a post-presentation conversation with the designer to clarify exactly what the transformation implied. If it was movies that determined the character of Prada's last few shows, here it was experimental theater that absorbed Miuccia. "A lot of Pina Bausch, avant-garde theater, political, mostly German, affected by Fassbender," she said.L'Usignolo, a woodwind concert group, performed live renditions of Kurt Weill's music, in competition with the pounding metal of Rammstein; so Teutonic avant-garderie was taken care of on the soundtrack. Quite how the notion applied to fashion was trickier. Miuccia claimed a shift in her sensibility: "More personal, changing from pop culture to intimacy, introversion, even solitude," she said. But, even after that insight, it was difficult to appreciate how the clothes matched the ethos. After Spring's sensational cinematic blowout, this felt very much like a collection that was treading water, biding its time. By way of contrast, the pre-fall collection for women that was threaded throughout the show seemed so much more… definite.There was, however, a reassuring unfussy real-ness to most of the menswear. The way generously cut trousers puddled on thick-soled trainers, for instance, or how blazers sported the dressiness of shawl collars. There were distinctive, definite colors too. A degree of theatricality could be detected in the subtle element of performance: The scoop-neck tee might have been borrowed from a ballet dancer, the stripes down trousers were a Sgt. Pepper touch. And the most obviously experimental pieces in the collection—protective quilted breastplates—apparently referenced German conceptualist/performance artist Joseph Beuys. So, it seems, did the fur coat. But, as far as intimacy or introversion went, what we saw were a whole lot of perfectly social jackets and pants.Any Prada collection is a finely woven web of reference and allusion. This one was clearly no exception, but ordinariness crept into the gap between ideal and actuality.
"More naive," was Miuccia's preference, "but too perverse to be innocent." Nowthat'sthe Prada we love. So, continuing in the theatrical vein, we should perhaps assume that this was a tryout. Act One. Next month will bring the women's show, Act Two, when all will be made clear.
11 January 2014
Because she works in fashion, it's easy to forget how political a creature Miuccia Prada has always been. Famously secretary of Milan's Communist party at one point, she is intimate with activism. But her activist impulse has usually found expression in the art world, where she has tirelessly championed the new. Tonight, she continued on that course—bringing in a group of mural artists to decorate the venue—while, at the same time, making a feminist statement that, in the light of the contemporary denigration of the very notion, came across as radical. "I want to inspire women to struggle," she said, after a show that will be hard to beat as the season's high point.The last time feminism enjoyed any popular currency might have been with the Riot Grrrls in the early nineties. Miuccia picked up on the tribalism of that concept. Her models were girl gangs (coded by hair color and graffitied eyelids); the street/sport element of the collection also had a gang element. And the murals against which the show took place—multi-visions of womanhood—echoed the political street art of L.A., Mexico, and South America. Images from those murals were picked up for use on the clothes and accessories. Oh yes, about those accessories—the most ladylike handbags in recent Prada history. Paired with tube socks and Miuccia's take on Tevas. The disconnect said all you needed to know about the designer's steadfast refusal to work without reference. Trying to draw lines betweenthisandthatin the collection was a fool's errand. Likewise, attempting to spot the influence—for instance, the work of mid-century artist Richard Lindner seemed to inform the spectacular color-blocking. But that might merely have been one onlooker's personal predilection.Nevertheless, there was a strongartisticelement in the show. The way the clothes were infected by the mural art energized them. And there was energy in the surprising appearance of Britney Spears on the sound track. (Admittedly, her latest track, "Work Bitch," has the uplifting pulse of the better side of EDM.) The contrast with Prada's men's show in June couldn't have been more striking. Miuccia made her males essentially passive participants in a dreamy, erotic reverie. Today, her women were ready to kick ass and rule.
18 September 2013
A Prada show doesn't get a title, but its set does. "Menacing Paradise" was the name given the painted façades that defined the show space today: palm fronds, sunsets, an equatorial town. There was a helicopter on the walls and the thwack of copter rotors on the soundtrack.Apocalypse Now? Well, Vietnam was on Miuccia Prada's mind, as were any of the tropical paradises that have been turned into war zones in the course of recent human history. The pain and suffering involved were more than enough to make her question what she called "the cliché of the exotic—and the cliché of summer." Beautiful surroundings, beautiful weather, with the ugliness of human nature providing the menacing counterpoint. In other words, brainy business as usual at Prada, with fashion called into play as the platform for an exchange of ideas.The tropical paradise Miuccia offered in her clothes was a dark place, its sun a lowering, lurid threat. It put you in mind of all those movies set in the tropics where everything goes badly for the characters.From Here to Eternity, for example: Hawaii in the 1940s, Pearl Harbor, Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra… "War and love," Miuccia summed it up—appropriate because her collection was a kind of love story, too. That's why there were women on the catwalk, in clothes that amplified the prints and details of the menswear. (They'll be sold as part of Resort.) But posed against the artless ingenues who modeled the men's collection, Miuccia's pretty women were knowing seductresses. In case you missed that point, the soundtrack fromBody Heatalternated with bursts of the Tangerine Dream track used at the end ofRisky Business. In both those movies, women held the cards.Which meant that this was one of Miuccia's more fascinating analyses of male powerlessness. That was partly because she made her men so languidly beautiful in their tropical prints, their silken blousons, and their generously tailored jackets and trousers. They were love objects: Montgomery Clift,From Here to Eternityagain. "Through cloth, you can really make movies," Miuccia said in February after her David Lynch-ian women's show. Today, she amplified that achievement. "Enlarging the panorama," she called it. "This is more complicated, more challenging. Just 'clothes' is boring. We need more passion, more humanity." And—she might have added—we need fashion to move forward, which today it did, in emotional terms at least.
22 June 2013
There was some consensus after tonight's revelatory Prada show that Miuccia had paraded her greatest hits. It's easy to see why people would think that. Some silhouettes and fabrics we recognized. Same with shoes (particularly the lug sole). The appetite for decoration signposted a signature Mrs. P herself defined as "a mix of rich and poor." And the casting included some much-missed faces from the Prada sorority (including the very welcome reappearance of Kirsten Owen, Liisa Winkler, and Esther de Jong).Miuccia's own take on the familiarity factor was typically laconic: "It's a lot of things I really like." If that meant the collection wasn't one of those move-the-goalposts breakthroughs that Prada has mastered over the years, it also guaranteed this was one of her most personal and emotional offerings to date. The designer can be a perfect sphinx, but here she seemed ready to open up, to admit her frustrations and acknowledge her obsessions.It was all there on the catwalk. Just as with her men's show in June, an artful back projection went live as the show started. The wheeling flocks of birds and irritated black cat were familiar from that earlier presentation, but there they were part of a scenario designed to underscore the "normal," and here Miuccia was adamant with her womenswear that "'normal' was not the right thing to do." Instead, a film noir mood: a spinning ceiling fan, shadows cast by blinds, a woman silhouetted in a doorway, waiting for…? Then, into that atmosphere pregnant with mystery stepped a woman in gorgeous disarray, a kissing cousin to the lush, unhinged beauty played by Laura Harring in David Lynch'sMulholland Drive. And thus did Miuccia launch her exercise in fashion as cinema. "Stories of women and life," she said later. "Who cares about the dress?"Except that her collection proved the power of the dress as an accessory to a life. "Through cloth, you can really make movies," the designer conceded. The music fromBetty Bluewas on the soundtrack as an aural cue: fixation with beauty, romanticism run riot. "I'm obsessed with impossibilities," she continued. "Romanticism is forbidden. It's not 'modern.'" Tell that to David Lynch, or Alfred Hitchcock, or any of those filmic geniuses who stepped outside the "modern" to delve into the truly timeless with their celluloid paeans to those lost souls who sacrifice everything for obsession. And that's where Miuccia Prada went today.
If fashion is ultimately an emotion, she pinned it to the wall for good and all.
20 February 2013
Keep the first look—blue sweater, untucked red shirt, houndstooth slacks—in mind while you reflect on Miuccia Prada's comment that she considered today's presentation "one of the most sophisticated I've ever done." Surely she was having us on. If that look was sophisticated, then Harry Styles is the new Cary Grant. But wait. As Miuccia went on to explain herself, her logic became clear. "Simplicity is so difficult. To make perfect something that is normal and classic is much harder." And make no mistake, Prada was in pursuit of perfection this season. The perfect sweater, the perfect shirt, the perfect fabric. It took nearly three months just to get right the perfect shades of red, blue, and yellow. "You want to wear everything," Miuccia enthused, "and that isreallywhat fashion is."The word "normal" stands out there. These were, on the whole, distinctlynormalclothes, worn in a distinctly casual way by distinctlynormalyoung men, with a few recognizable professionals and some older faces thrown in for good measure. "Normality can be provocative," Miuccia insisted. "Banality is the reality of life. I don't like a fantasy about life." But don't forget that this "normality," in all its checked-shirt-camel-coated innocence, had been studiously crafted by highly sophisticated minds. There was an element of signature Prada perversity in that.Innocence, perversity, banality: Head back to the collection armed with that gleesome threesome and another vision—a peculiar hybrid of the fifties and the nineties—began to insinuate itself. The velvet-trimmed coat collars, the ruffled shirts, the drainpipes, and the thick-soled brogues had a Teddy Boy tang. But it was mixed in with something that felt like Prada menswear from an earlier time. The clue was the nudge of knowingness that often makes you feel with Prada that you might be missing the point. Never mind. "In six months, we will say the opposite," said Miuccia, all too versed in thesui generisrhythms of the fashion industry.And in six months, we may also see the actual furniture produced by Knoll from the geometric "anticipations" designed by Rem Koolhaas's company AMO that furnished today's elaborate, enthralling set. It was made up of rooms in an "ideal house," with screens that featured interior and exterior views onto a cityscape. They went "live" when the show began. As flocks of birds wheeled past "windows," a Siamese cat ambled from screen to screen, through rooms, along windowsills.
In an age ofLife of Pi-sized wonders, this was one more.
12 January 2013
"Dream is forbidden, nostalgia is forbidden, to be too sweet is not good. Everything we used to feel historically, now you can't enjoy. The clothes are the expression of this impossible dream." Miuccia Prada was in existential mode backstage tonight, talking about sentiment and feeling—both our yearnings for a more innocent state and the futility of those yearnings. No wonder there was a lot to unpack on the runway. The flowers, the pervasive Japonisme—here we had Prada embracing traditional tropes of femininity and womanhood, a geisha's servitude, even. And yet in her signature way, she couldn't help turning those notions inside out.She opened with a short black dress in stiff satin, a panel print of two flowers stitched to the torso. There were only a handful of looks that followed that didn't have some sort of florals blooming on them: A white fur coat (for Spring!) was inset with Andy Warhol's Pop art daisies in red (adding to the sixties feeling was the collection's whiff of Courrèges). A black satin coat, meanwhile, was embroidered with papery origami blossoms. Still, the clothes had a spareness that worked like a balm after seasons of endless prints.The collection moved from dark to light. By the end, Prada was manipulating, folding, and wrapping duchesse satin in palest pink and green to evoke the ritual of kimono dressing. (Both the runway and the columns in the show space were decadently lined with that satin.) Prada explained that the Japanese element came late in the design process. "I wanted it to be tough and serious," she said. "All the folding was a consequence." Duchesse satin tough? Again there was that duality.There was poetry to these clothes, but walking the runway in either towering Harajuku girl platforms or leather judo socks bound with patent leather bows—flats in both cases, Prada pointed out—the models exuded power too. Leave it to Miuccia to tweak nostalgia into something that felt modern and new.
19 September 2012
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
27 June 2012
Tonight's Prada show began. Then it ended. No sense of climax. The models, male and female, older, younger, finished up where they started out, at the top of a long, white, featureless ramp. The color palette and the clothes, reduced to a handful of basic items, stayed the same throughout, essentially gender-oblivious, bar the few fur pieces sported by the women, who were also wearing headbands. (Several audience members were catching a Gwyneth-in-Royal Tenenbaumsvibe, but that seemed a tad literal for Prada.) Even the shoes, always a weather vane in a Prada show, were exactly the same unisex style of sandal from beginning to end. Maybe Miuccia was saying thateverythinghad become hopelessly homogenized. The same. Or perhaps—a positive spin here—she was implying that everything was equal. Or maybe it was both—sameandequal. That, at least, is what she suggested after the show.Miuccia insisted the whole thing was quite deliberately a blank canvas, the beginning of a new chapter in the Prada story. "Simplicity is repetitiveandequal," she said. "After years of references and accessorizing, I felt the need to be so equal." It was only two days ago that she decided to add women to the show, the clincher that established the fundamental homogeneity of the whole proposition. Without their presence, it wouldn't have been so obvious that the collection's decorative elements had been pared to almost nothing: the border around a neckline or a placket or a hem. "The border is a timeless decoration, from Ancient Greece onwards," Miuccia explained. She added that it had taken three days to get the border on the collar of a polo shirt just right. On the other hand, she also claimed that the collection had come together faster than anything she'd ever done.The tick-tock sameness of the presentation, coupled with the heightened physical perfection of the models, unusual in a Prada presentation, sparked a left-field analogy with a mad scientist's effort to create a perfect world. Out marched an army of cookie-cutter humans in clothes that were so band-box fresh they still had the creases in them. A brave new world? On that level, the show might be utterly epochal for Prada. But on a more immediate level, the repetition was numbing, and it fostered the inescapable feeling that it will take some additional Miuccia magic to get this collection from here to the shop floor.
23 June 2012
It is entirely typical of Miuccia Prada that a collection which, for her at least, was a celebration of fashion at its purest, should read in photographs like an assault on the very notion she was attempting to exalt. With their hair and makeup, Guido Palau and Pat McGrath endeavored to project "virtual princesses," avatars of fashion's digital age. On the catwalk, the models looked a little like a replicant army, even more so in photos. It was a powerful image, which dovetailed neatly with the statement about power that Miuccia made with her men's collection in January. But that wasn't actually the message she wanted to communicate. The canapés that were served before and after the show (and remember, these are significant markers of the essence of every Prada collection) included sweet-treat meringues and chocolates topped by crystallized violets. "Pleasure," Miuccia explained. "Everyone has a theory about their collections these days, but I'm sick of theory. This collection is about thepleasureof fashion."In her eyes, the designer was making a statement about the enduring human aspiration to beauty, inspired, in part, by the natural world around us. Beauty, Prada style, is a sui generis proposition. The elements Miuccia chose read, in some respects, like a Prada's greatest hits: the mutated menswear, the bad-taste jacquards, the pajama dressing, the embellishment (and maybe even the Numanoid electronica from soundtrack architect Frederic Sanchez that underpinned the whole shebang). But such reduction can never do justice to the depth of fascinating thought and research that go into a Prada collection. The show-opening black coat-dresses, for instance, looked like hybrid morning coats, which harked back to the antique diplomat formality of the Prada men's show. But that also reflected Miuccia's conviction that the fashion of the future will take refuge in the past. (That's hardly a new notion—just look atBlade Runner, a movie that may have been a reference here.) Then there were the embroideries. As precious as they appeared, they were actually multilayered constructs of Plexi and sequins, but what they conveyed, said Miuccia, was "importance." She felt that was a more significant message for women than mere power. In its own way, it was oddly seductive. The imposingly stern quality of these clothes will likely lay out an influential new path for womenswear.
22 February 2012
“Prada Presents: Il Palazzo. A Palace of Role Play.”If Miuccia Prada’s invitation suggested a grand theatrical event, the setting confirmed it. The Prada show space had been reconfigured as a huge court, laid with a massive 20- by 35-meter carpet in red, white, and black. Later in the show, a parade of stars—including Gary Oldman, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, and Jamie Bell—would walk that red carpet rather than the one that was rolling out at the same time in Los Angeles for the Golden Globes. A part in a Prada performance clearly carries enough clout to draw marquee names. But then, this particular performance was something so extraordinary that it would surely seem irresistible to actors who might feel they've already done it all.“A parody of male power,” Miuccia declared backstage. The power was palpable. That giant carpeted red square (which in itself seemed like a conscious echo) felt like the flooring in a conference hall in one of the palaces where cabals of diplomats and military men once met to decide the world’s fate at a turning point in history. The formality of the collection offered exactly the sort of clothes you could imagine them wearing: double-breasted suits buttoned high, astrakhan-collar coats, pinstriped jackets with a flower in the buttonhole. The men who wore such things would surely have valets, a point that was made clear when models stripped to the kind of crisp white cotton underwear that an Edwardian gentleman's gentleman would have recognized.But this wasn’t simple sartorial historicism. Remember, this was a parody of power. So nothing was as it seemed. Formal clothes were actually cut from denim; what appeared from afar as wool barathea or mohair was really cotton. Look closely at the ornate, baroque patterning on shirts and you'd see rows of American football helmets or feathered Native American headdresses. Tailored topcoats woven in jacquard looked more like silk bathrobes. And the formal white-tie neckgear was a mock turtle on a tee. An awful lot of ingenious thought had gone into making a statement about the emptiness of dressing to impress, while, at the same time, producing clothes that will entice men to do exactly that.This Chinese-box ingenuity carried through to the last moment of the show, when nine professionals, richly rewarded for their role playing, paraded one by one around the red square, “as if following a secret script,” according to the accompanying notes.
If you accept that actors play archetypes, then each of them represented a particular kind of man. It wasn’t only the accompanying soundtrack of Michael Nyman’s music fromThe Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Loverthat cued Tim Roth as a gangster or Adrien Brody as a dandy. Gary Oldman was particularly impressive as thecapo di tutti capi, in his breast pocket a pair of red-lensed sunglasses just like the ones he wore in his performance asDracula. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Shakespeare said it first, but Miuccia Prada showed it best for Fall 2012.
14 January 2012
"Sweetness." Miuccia Prada's summation of her new collection was surprisingly direct. But only she could add a contrary gloss to an idea that, on the surface at least, seemed entirely benign. She'd been trying to wrap her head around this paradox: Why should a quality that the world at large considers such an asset to womanhood be so shunned by the fashion industry? That state of affairs is unlikely to prevail for much longer, given the crazy level of influence Miuccia wields over fashion (her dropped waists from Fall are other designers' big statement for Spring). So better ready yourself to Celebrate the Sweet.Except no one else will be able to do it quite like this. Italian men have two meaningful relationships in their lives: women and cars. Miuccia put the two together—women in cars—and situated them in a moment in time (maybe the last such) when the world was awash with unambiguous hope for the future. That would be the 1950's. If the Prada men's collection for Spring was haunted by the ghost of Elvis, its female counterpart paraded echoes of Marilyn in her accordion-pleated dress fromThe Seven Year Itch. The models did walk over a subway grate, but it was unfortunately technically impossible to provide the updraft that would have gusted skirts skyward in a re-creation of one of Hollywood's most iconic movie moments.There were, however, other, equally resonant ways for Miuccia to make her point. The celluloid iconography was irresistible: B-movie roadhouse gals in bandeau tops and leather pencil skirts that had been customized by their spray-painting mechanic boyfriends; David Lynch heroines in varsity jackets and sunray pleats; rhinestone cowgirls in studded Baracutas. If the sweetness in such tough cookies was a little elusive, Miuccia also offered coats in lace or crochet in palest pink and blue and bathing suits that begged for pinup poses round the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Plus, the adorable print theme from the men's collection took an automotive turn. At the very least, Italian manhood will be happy. But the rest of the world should feel just as uplifted when the double whammy of Prada menswear and womenswear hits stores next spring. Dare you not to smile.
21 September 2011
The Baracuta jacket that Elvis Presley wears inKing Creoleis one of his more iconic looks, but it's not necessarily an item you'd attach to a collection of Resort-oriented womenswear—unless, of course you were Miuccia Prada, whose wide-ranging assault on fashion orthodoxy takes no prisoners. The Baracuta, with its contrast yoke, outlined here in studs, is a foundation stone of her latest collection. She paired it with a pale blue cowboy shirt, June Carter to the spirit of Johnny Cash, who hovered provocatively over the menswear she showed in June. Miuccia also harked back to that show's kooky golf subtext with loud florals. Cropped, cuffed cotton jeans in the print might have been the kind of piece a golf widow would've worn on a never-ending weekend afternoon in the early sixties when her husband (wearing matching pants) was on the links. The foulards and caps could also have been lifted from his closet.Such touchstones were only the most left-field reference points in a lineup that decade-skipped willfully from a prim floral dress with a doubled Peter Pan collar, shirred waist, and pleated skirt to an entirely sheer black lace piece that managed to be both widow-worthy and fetish-fabulous at the same time. Along the way, there were forties-style crepe dresses with draped waists and narrow three-quarter sleeves, and aMad Mengroup of bouclé separates in ice-creamy shades of pink, orange, and yellow. The styling—cardigans worn on the shoulders, buttoned at the throat—was proper in the way a Hitchcock blonde is proper, i.e., severely unhinged. Which means—as is the case with Prada collections generally—these clothes threaten to infiltrate dreams with their seductive off-ness.
13 July 2011
Miuccia Prada has always insisted she is most inspired by things she hates. On the evidence of her new men's collection, she clearly has no time for golf. But her distaste sparked a collection that was even more playful and upbeat than Spring-Summer 2010's smash hit. After the show, Miuccia conceded that the wacky world surrounding golf, with its eccentric dress codes and good-taste-be-damned point of view, had rather captivated her. It's a world not incompatible with her own. The set for today's show, for instance, was an acre of emerald green Astroturf dotted with blue cubes on which the audience perched (an abstract rendition of the earth and sky of the ideal golf course, perhaps). The soundtrack was Fun Boy Three's "The Tunnel of Love" and "Summertime," which, in this context, took on a kitschy funfair vigor. And the clothes and accessories?Golf, obviously, in the checked tailoring, the louder-the-better floral-printed pants and blousons, the caps and multicolored kilties, and the Prada-branded clubs. Miuccia had also woven in a strand of Americana with rhinestone-studded cowboy shirts and ole western boots. The lone figure of the rhinestone golfer seemed a suitably surreal Prada hero.But it was in the prints where the collection came most alive. A vintage shirt found in Miami supplied a naïve visual of dancing couples that the Prada studio mutated into other leisure activities: surfing, boating, and, yes, golfing. The fact that they could have been illustrations from a children's book only emphasized the spirit and verve of a collection that kicked some much-needed life into the men's season in Milan.
18 June 2011
Miuccia Prada's often impenetrable thought processes were more naked than usual this season. She wanted to perform a perverse/reverse alchemy: Take the clichés of worldly female glamour—sequins, snakeskin, fur, the color pink—and make them innocent again. After the show, she harked back to her lace collection of Fall 2008. "I'm curious about women," she said. "I want to challenge their passion."A year ago, Miuccia was exalting the womanly form at its shapeliest. Here, she opted for the dropped-waist, straight-up-and-down silhouette of the twenties flapper—or the sixties dolly bird. Wide belts were slung low over big-buttoned coat-dresses or sheer shifts. Given that both the aforementioned decades were periods of female emancipation, it was hard to take Prada to task for a potential retreat to the elevation of—what would be for most of her customers—unattainable girlishness. Besides, she referenced her beloved Saint Laurent with a block print evoking his Mondrian dress from 1965, a piece that is, forever and always, the quintessence of fashion modernism. And, on top of that, the collection danced gleefully around those adult elements of desirability that Miuccia has made her own—bags and shoes. Especially noteworthy were the latter, including boots offered in a killer trompe l'oeil combo of high heel and knee-high, particularly provocative in python.Python was also cut into cocoonlike twenties-style coats with big fur lapels. The reptile angle was pursued with a series of outfits coated with huge plastic scales. But were the girls serpents or mermaids? It was the kind of question that leaves a Prada audience uncertain about spontaneous responses. "Let me sleep on it," say the flummoxed journalists as they leave a show. Whatever, today's finale flourish was a gorgeous effect that perfectly encapsulated Miuccia's intended aim of innocent glamour. Let's plump for mermaids.A footnote: At Prada there is always at least one element that doesn't quite gel. Here, it was the way the models clutched their bags tightly to their chests. Ladylike might be one interpretation. Shields could be another. That's food for thought for the next collection.
23 February 2011
Judas Priest? At aPradashow? Oh well, Miuccia is nothing if not full of surprises, and Frederic Sanchez's pedal-to-the-metal soundtrack for her show today was only one among many of the question marks that hovered over her latest offering. Bearing in mind that one must always be aware of the context she creates for each new collection, the audience was offered Brandy Alexanders, Manhattans, and Blue Lagoons—cocktails from another time and place. The canapés were luridly colored squares of sandwich anchored with cocktail olives, and the set was a two-storied "house" with linoleum on the floor. So far, so kitsch. And that was before we saw the brown suede jacket with the maroon diamond pattern, or the mock turtleneck in emerald green Lurex—the kind of items a flashy traveling salesman might have donned in the sixties or the seventies to cruise the casino in whatever one-horse burg he'd washed up in for the night (after he'd been driving all day with the Priest on his eight-track). Some of the models carried a big square bag that could well have been that salesman's sample case.Mercifully, you can't pin a Prada collection down to one scenario. Mr. Salesman is nobody's dream. But here, there was also a bizarre subtext—britches, stockings, pudding-bowl haircuts—that suggested puritans, until the knee-highs turned Lurex-sparkly. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that Prada has deliberately flirted with the out-of-time peculiar.Getting back to suede for a moment, Miuccia has always insisted it's one of her least favorite things, yet it was all over this collection. In fact, she was even sporting a black suede jacket. But that intangible oddness may actually be the essence of Prada. She could have been quoting from herself with Art Deco prints (more mock turtles) that looked like sixties upholstery. And the ultra-boxy, three-button jackets that determined the collection's silhouette took the deconstruction the label has been flirting with in its menswear to a logical but alienating extreme (as compared to Spring's happy humanism).A blast of Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" took us back to that salesman-in-the-casino analogy. The cards remind us that life's a gamble. And Miuccia surely knows that not every bet pays off.
15 January 2011
Only Miuccia Prada could attach a label like "minimal baroque" to a collection whose references ranged from hospital scrubs to seventeenth-century cherubs to Jazz Age superwoman Josephine Baker. Fishing around for an alternative to "fresh," she herself came up with "brave, bold, and obvious"—that last one a typical head-spinner. Maybe there was something obvious in the sheer uplift of the solid blocks of primary color; the jungle prints and striped sombreros; the straightforward summery-ness of a spaghetti-strapped, ruffle-hemmed dress striped in orange and pink. But there was also more than enough of Prada's twisty-ness to boost this collection into her already chock-full pantheon of greats. Those cherubs, for a start, plucked from a curlicued baroque interior and all mixed up with bananas and naive monkeys in an exuberantly cartoonish print that looked like something lifted from a poster for a Josephine Baker performance at the Folies Bergère in the twenties. (The models' finger-waved hair also echoed Baker's.) But there was nothing cartoonish about a supremely elegant white shift with a Baker-like silhouette sinuously snaking up and out of a forest of multicolored curlicues.Prada delivered electric hits of orange, green, blue, and radioactive violet in deliberately plain cotton suits, like the most (extra)ordinary uniforms. That theme continued in all the stripes. Prisoner, postman, sailor, orderly: The uniforms might have taken a cue from her last—equally special—men's collection, but they were also an evolution of Fall's spectacularly womanly shapes. This time around, however, the glamour was raw, amplified by the pop-colored stoles the models were toting, the graphic silent-movie makeup by Pat McGrath, and the severely sensual outfits in basic black that closed the show as the soundtrack crackled with the static of an old tango record. Miuccia's message was crystal-clear. As she said backstage, banana earrings vibrating: "It's time to be bold." And that's one maxim that, with any luck, will rub off on the world at large.
22 September 2010
The idea of role-playing tantalized Miuccia Prada in both her Miu Miu and signature collections this Resort season. She wanted her lookbook photographed as a series of portraits, entirely distinct looks set against different backdrops, with the core of the whole exercise being her desire for absolute simplicity (also the key to her men's collection for Spring 2011). It may not look so simple, though, because seldom has there been such an extravagant abundance of options in a Prada collection, especially in the accessories department.The strength of this particular season was its breadth. Prada seemed to be dressing women for any role they might fancy—from the groomed, elegant lady in the rose-printed tea dress to the khaki-clad army bride to the tomboy in the sailor top with a pair of baggy denims tied at the waist (borrowed from the men's collection). The unifying thread was an unfussy lightheartedness that dictated that the only difference between a cocktail dress and a beach cover-up was the length of the skirt.Another idea translated from Prada's Spring menswear was the super-fitted stretch suit, this one in denim. In fact, denim was one of the building blocks of the line. No irony there. Nor was there any in a sweet peasant dress with elasticated neck and puff sleeves, patterned like bright blue azulejos from Portugal, which made it the kind of outfit that might linger as a souvenir of summer. The blue and white fox stole draped casually over a bathing suit, on the other hand, had a true Prada perversity.
21 June 2010
Whatwasthat set that the Prada audience walked in on today? Rows of massive concrete columns held apart two huge metal grilles, forming a boxy industrial space that could have been an underground car park, or the foundations of a skyscraper, or the bowels of theBattlestar Galactica. But then the lights snapped on with a sizzle, the mutated pulse of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" filled the room, and the show started with a lean blue suit, white shirt, and tie—the traditional male business uniform in all its three-buttoned glory.As things progressed, uniforms from around the globe emerged as the theme. Backstage, Miuccia Prada explained that she had wanted everything as simple as possible in terms of fabrication, construction, and silhouette. So she used cotton, the hardest-working fabric in the world. From there she landed on the idea of working clothes, with a number being made from denim, the hardest-working cotton of all. Denim was used for hospital scrubs, layered over a shirt and tie of the same fabric, and was also cut into some of those lean three-buttons, one with white contrast stitching.There were blues other than denim blues that evoked other uniforms: postmen, sailors (lots of boatnecks). Potent hits of color, meanwhile, were intended to suggest uniforms from other countries, the cross-cultural crush being a Prada signature. Striped shirts even looked a little like sports kit, especially in tandem with the baggy shorts that gave the collection an added airiness. Shoes took the weight this season with superthick soles made from sandwiching other soles together: wing-tips, espadrilles, trainers.The week in Milan so far has been marked by heavy-ish collections that seem to pay little mind to the season for which they're intended. True, the weather here has been laughably grim for the start of summer, but Prada at least offered clothes that were light, playful, and optimistic, culminating in bright striped cotton sweaters that said it can only get better from here.
19 June 2010
To take a lead now in the headlong rush and cacophony of multi-platform fashion-news generation, it takes a clear mind to figure out what women want, and what we're lacking. And, far more radically, to address aspects of the system that have been (to say the least) annoying the hell out of many. Miuccia Prada did that today with a calm shrug."It's normal clothes," she said backstage before her show. "Classics. Revising the things I did in the nineties." Behind her, models, hair done up in sixties beehives, were changing. Among them were Doutzen Kroes, Catherine McNeil, Lara Stone, and Miranda Kerr, young women whose relatively curvaceous beauty has generally exempted them from being cast as exemplars of female gorgeousness on runways such as Prada's for the past few years.The clothes themselves were a deliberate, and quietly humorous, compliment to the womanly. If it's the possession of breasts that's been bothering model-casting agents for the past few years, this collection was a nightmare scenario for them. The ample bust was the unavoidable focal point of the silhouette, picked out in balconies of lace ruffles and upstanding pointy-bra formations on raised-waist, wide-skirted dresses and coats. Any girl on the runway who didn't have the natural Bardot-esque equipment was bestowed with it by means of frothy fabric placements, but the eye naturally migrated to the ones who did. The others, young and pretty as they are, marched on in the usual kind of anonymity. In fashion, appreciating the exceptional is always more interesting.Model politics apart, this was not a one-issue shape-lib show. For aficionados, the collection was, as the designer promised, a thorough revisiting of Prada's strengths. She worked the house double-face cashmere into flattering dance-skirted fifties-sixties dresses and skirts, detailed jackets and coats with double-layered collars of cable knit and fur, cut A-line skirts in patent leather, and reprised her signature scratchy-grid prints. Then she broke into an extended riff on Prada knitwear, made into tweedy peacoat-ed suits and chunky belted sweaters. By the time she sent out black coats, smothered with jet embroidery, the entire repertoire of brand Prada—down to the pointy pumps and kooky tweedy socks—had been refreshed and reconsolidated.
It was nice to see that Prada envisages this being worn by women other than the zombie army of teen models that has roamed her runway recently—and that has influenced others to mimic that uniform aesthetic. Customers, she can be assured, will like that shift—but will it have a bigger ripple effect than that? Miuccia Prada is a fashion-industry influencer. Let's see who scrambles to follow the leader.
24 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
16 January 2010
Her latest presentation took the unusual (for Prada) step of mixing men's and women's clothes together, but after it was all over, Miuccia herself insisted there'd always been an umbilical connection between the collections, and, in this particular case, it had been so inescapable that it made perfect sense to show them together. So the pre-fall looks for women shared fabrics, silhouettes, and an enigmatic early-seventies sensibility with the men's clothes for Fall. The keynote outfit might have been a huge pink waffle-knit sweater over a short, geometrically printed skirt. It suggested a moody receptionist, or, perhaps, a trendy student, as did the cropped shearling worn over a cardigan with leather-covered buttons. Another print, a jigsaw of pink and khaki, looked like a candy camouflage. In a coat-dress, it had a teen-beat sweetness that was more suggestive of Miu Miu than Prada's main line, especially paired as it was with the chunky-heeled, big-tongued shoes. The candy motif also popped up in buttons as big and round as gobstoppers. In the past, Miuccia has admitted she'll test herself by using fabrics she actually hates. This time, it was moleskin's turn to be tailored into coats and jackets. But the moleskin was easier to love than a group of vinyl looks that gave off a heady whiff of polyurethane as they breezed by. Prada's collections always reward reflection, but, as we mentioned elsewhere, this one's send-off was a big, bold "to be continued." We'll bide our time for some resolution.
16 January 2010
It's a measure of Miuccia Prada's reputation as one of fashion's great intellectuals that we can be thrown into a mild tizzy when she's being (relatively) light and straightforward. For Spring, there weren't any of the brooding, disconcerting undercurrents we expect from her; no hard-to-read subtextual brain teasing. Instead, Prada did "business to beach," a representation, she said, of "how life is today. High and low, palazzos, and the popular," and, she smiled, "I really liked it."Her girl was chic and together looking, with a teased, side-swept hairdo and shiny vermilion lips, making her way through a high-tech fantasy set on which projections of sumptuous Italianate interiors—checkered marble floors, pillars, chandeliers—alternated with fragments from touristy beach scenes. The merging of modernity and classicism played in the fabric of the opening "business" section: precise, angular gray duchesse satin and nylon coats, jackets, vests, and Bermudas that had been scissored off to leave raw edges. Manipulated photographic prints showing palm trees, beach umbrellas, and lounging holidaymakers were then applied to jackets, short shorts, and panties—seemingly an evocation of the fifties and sixties, though actually, according to Prada, drawn from images of a man-made resort in Japan. "It took me ages to find the right one," she said.In other words, there was plenty of the wearable Prada in there (ignoring the panties and the section of semi-sheer cloque baby-doll things), pieces to appease both the seekers of minimal daywear and the collectors of her decorative print-y things. In the finale, too, there were offerings of the embellishment overload that is also an essential part of Prada, including silver- and crystal-embroidered tops and showpieces made of strung-together chandelier components. No existential-political angst about the state of the world, then? Not at all—and that, Prada concluded, is just her point. "When things are bad, you have to come out from that. Optimism," she declared, "is a choice."
23 September 2009
If the economy is getting to Miuccia Prada, her Resort collection didn't show it. In sharp contrast to the austerity of her Fall show, this one had pretty draped-back dresses in camel color-blocked with pastels; cheeky scarf-print bikini briefs with ties at the hips, worn with neon-bright button-downs; and eye candy in the form of little duffel bags in colorful florals that matched the models' ankle-tie sandals. The bow was a recurring motif, appearing at the neckline and elbows of an asymmetrically draped black top, at the hem of narrow underskirts, and at the back of float-y, vaguely 1920's-ish wallpaper-print dresses. The cumulative effect was appealingly unstudied. Call it Prada's antidote for trying fashion times.
1 June 2009
One thing's for certain: Miuccia Prada is not going to the eighties disco for Fall. Instead, her collection seemed to be a call for austerity measures, if that's what you can read into boiled wool forties-style coats and suits, clothes that might have been appropriated from domestic upholstery fabric, and (possibly for women going back to the land for survival) kinky fishing waders. It was a bizarre take on utility even Prada found hard to explain. "I didn't want to do anything about the city," she said, "more something about sport and the outdoors in general—freedom and nature. But in the end, I realized I liked coats and suits. It was serious, in a way. It was about a need for feminine empowerment." Prada's women, with their violently frizzed-up hair, certainly had a disconcerting look about them as they advanced, with red-rimmed glitter-ringed eyes catching the light with a nearly malevolent glint. What they were wearing was constructed from substantial tweed and stiff leather, slit to reveal sexually incendiary flashes of naked leg and red knit underwear.As is entirely normal in the Miuccia Prada universe, any easy reading of narrative or reference was thrown off at every turn. Some of the strangeness was in the search for new volumes, swinging heavily from the shoulder in triangular, sometimes fur-laden shapes, or pinched into peplums by narrow, mannish leather belts. The footwear—wide-topped leather boots or velvet heels with Mohawk patent fringing at the heel—only added to the oddness of it all. In the end, however, it was not so disorientating and experimental that Prada codes weren't also fully exercised. The tweedy tailoring, fur, paillette embroidery, and, of course, the bags (now in plain businesslike leather or, for evening, an update of last winter's novelty sequin) have been staples for years. Even though Miuccia Prada might be considered one of fashion's out-there thinkers, this is still clearly a time to keep the brand fires burning.
28 February 2009
While it's overdoing it to read too much symbolic importance into any pre-fall collection, the clothes Prada will ship into stores starting in June could serve as a brief diagram of the fundamental need/desire dichotomy that's opening up in fashion now. On the "need" side, there's a pragmatic black pantsuit (with a gather and tuck in the shoulder to give emphasis without padding), capacious utilitarian bags with nylon inserts, and plain classic Prada cardigans, as well as low-outlay comfort objects in the form of woolly socks, arm warmers, and knitted beanies with a peak and tassel. And on the "desire" front, there's a womanly burgundy pouf-skirted swirl of a dance dress that might've stepped straight out of aMad Mencocktail scene, and draped black velvet dresses (subverted with leather inserts) that defy the idea that clothing must be useful and restrained in order to appeal. The new accessory is a fringed curtain of jet bead sewn onto a broad ribbon that can be tied at the hip to approximate a flapper skirt, or wrapped at the neck to become a flyaway neckpiece. Dual-purpose, hard-working fashion? Another way to go when money's tight.
10 February 2009
Miuccia Prada had a sound bite for her Spring collection. "It's primitive," she said, "going back to what counts." And what counts most in a back-to-basics time, when most of us will need truly visceral temptation to get us out and shopping? Why, glamour and eroticism, of course. When the chips are down, there is no one who can turn up the thermostat of subversive sexual provocation quite as high as Mrs. Prada. Her girls, their skin glistening as if on a fevered summer's night, might have been passing through on their way to or from lovers' assignations, their clothes disarranged in various states of falling-off or looking as if they might do so at any moment. Rumpled and crinkled fabrics have been appearing all over this season, but never with such sly intent. One pull of a trailing drawstring tape and, whoops! A person could find herself half naked. Not that this collection is, of course, at all brassy. From some angles, it can all look like a perfectly innocent summery dishevelment—that is, until there's a glimpse into an open-sided dress, or a cashmere sweater turns to display hospital-tape ties holding the back together (or just about).There was something fabulously Italian about all this shameless reveling in femininity. The fifties overtones, with the high chignons, the ruched bras, and swishing rear action in the below-knee pencil skirts, managed to channel the heyday of Cinecittà without cliché. Best of all, this is a collection destined to look even better on a woman with a real body than it does on a teen model. And that, Mrs. Prada surely knows, really is "what counts."
22 September 2008
Post-show, Miuccia Prada cited her inspiration as a man poised between fragility and power, hanging in the balance—in other words, between extremes. As usual, her enigmatic comment cast an illuminating light on the collection we'd just seen. The first outfits out were a parka and blouson hanging off the models' shoulders on straps. Once upon a time, Helmut Lang offered up the same idea, but where his version suggested fierce refugee pragmatism (you have to be ready to carry your world on your back), Miuccia's made a nice portrait neckline for her new batch of boychicks. But at the same time, there was a hint of tension—suspension—in the idea. And it was extended in subtle details like the elastic bands that wrapped shoes or encircled waists.You could parse Prada collections till hell froze over, so loaded with suggestion are they. That button "buried" in a double-breasted jacket? True, Margiela already explored the idea of the phantom garment, but it doesn't make it any less seductive. And the elongated polo layered over cotton smock layered over boxer shorts? It evoked emergency-room or sanitarium whites—what better way to convey the subtext of men in crisis? But step back from obsessive fandom and there were irresistible basics, like a gussied-up Gap: perfectly tailored pants, fine knits, cotton shirts, top-stitched denims. All this and a gold latex coat: As the mannequin moved, it trembled, poised indeed between fragility and power.
21 June 2008
A few of her favorite things. That summed up a Resort collection that was an amalgam of Miuccia Prada's perennial motifs. Active sport was represented by bike shorts and Windbreakers worn as evening toppers. A leopard print's roar was balanced by a twee heart motif. And almost every piece—from bikini tops to ladylike dresses with pleated gores—was encrusted with maharaja-meets-la dolce vita-style jewels. As a result, what the collection lacked in scope it made up for in the sort of sheer dazzle that Prada is so adept at providing.
9 June 2008
Miuccia Prada is about to do for the lace industry what Nicolas Ghesquière did for flower printers last season—send the mills into frantic overdrive. After glimpsing a piece of lace in her studio and at first ignoring it, she found the handmade fabric crept up on her, to the point where it took over almost the entire collection. "I thought using a little bit here and there is tacky, so we've had all Switzerland working on couture lace. They're in shock," Prada laughed after the show. "When you are working on something simple, the surface is important. I wanted to do minimal, something that was feminine and strong—but in the end, not so sexy. And there are a lot of references to early nineties Prada in there."There was something almost sinister in the cumulative effect of seeing a legion of girls advancing down a steep spiral runway in dizzying numbers of transparent outfits in black, brown, bronze, silver, and pale blue lace. After the first looks of opaque black suiting and dresses implanted with strange upstanding frills (with matching frilled patent cone-heeled shoes), the show shifted into full-lace gear. At first, it came layered over buttoned-up blue shirts, which in turn went over another nude-colored stretch shirt, creating an odd, done-up, double-collar effect. Below, the unlined A-line skirts gave a clear view of big panties—a nostalgic view, in fact, for they were one of the sly, self-referential nineties-Prada codes that were inserted here and there (fashion-history train spotters could also tick off the industrial metal clips on the bra straps).There was an erotic force to the show that came out of the tension between covered-up shape and transparency, and an underlying, near-fetishistic darkness that steered the lace away from any sense of froufrou prettiness. Not quite goth, not quite dominatrix, it was an elusive thing to label. If it was one-note (and a bit disconcerting for fans worrying about where their winter coats and jackets are coming from), it also packed that powerful, slightly unsettling image that is, of course, the full Prada experience.
18 February 2008
Miuccia Prada's passion for the work of Yves Saint Laurent is the stuff of legend: In her student days, as secretary of the Communist party in Milan, she'd lead protest marches in vintage YSL. Saint Laurent's clothes for Catherine Deneuve in 1967'sBelle de Jourstruck a particularly personal chord, as they captured both Deneuve's bourgeois hauteur and the current of transgression that ran beneath it. So it was easy to see Miuccia's latest men's collection as a kind ofBeau du Jourfor the way that it pushed sobriety into the realm of fetish.The theme was duality from the first outfit: a charcoal suit, sober enough, but its jacket was wrapped in an almost feminine way. And it was worn with a shirt that had two collars, one quite clerical. (The shoes also had a two-tone effect, and the swell of celestial voices in David Motion's "Buoyancy" on the soundtrack underscored the twisted religiosity.) The bi-collar was a foretaste of what can only be described as a male bikini, which combined a bib front with what appeared to be a visible jockstrap (or maybe male garter belt?) and closed at the back like a waistcoat (or bra). Wags instantly dubbed the look "wedgie chic," but it was more disturbing than that—as if traditional concepts of masculinity had been turned inside out. Of course, this is something Miuccia's talked about for years, but it was still striking to see it rendered so graphically. Even more so when a couple of back-buttoning blouses walked past—male vulnerability wrapped up in a shirt.That notion was amplified through flesh-toned knits that gave the impression of nudity, or traditional male garb reduced to fragments—a collar and cuffs, for instance. Something about this hinted at Helmut Newton's classic photos of Saint Laurent's collections in the seventies. In other words, a typically provocative Miuccia exercise. And, boy-kini aside, the shimmery shirts, silvery shoes, and suits with a tonic gleam will be near the top of Fall 2008's wish list.
12 January 2008
Fairies? At Prada? Why, yes: When Miuccia is fed up with being perverse in the anarchic-fierce way, she'll change tack yet again and go against the grain by being so sweetly unchallenging you (almost) can't recognize her. So Prada for Spring went late sixties, early seventies, Art Nouveau-ish—tripping off into the kind of tendrilly doodles girls used to scrawl on their bedroom walls after studying their hippie-romantic rock album covers. At any rate, that was what seemed to be evolving as a collection of silk-printed tunics, paired with cropped flared trousers and cutaway spat-boots, began to wend its way out. They were followed by skinny-rib knits, some in the form of all-in-ones, and then it was away with the fairy story: wood-nymph illustrations printed on greenish-tinted chiffon, growing over skirt petals and entwining themselves around the bodices of dresses.It was, said Prada, "about trying to find a new creativity." It was certainly a softening up from the last two seasons and technically accomplished in its curvilinear lines, traced with contrast piping to run around necklines and up to chokerlike collars. Clumpy-heeled suede platforms and cutaway boots grounded it all in some eye-catching footwear. If that sounds retro—maybe a little Ossie Clark or Biba—it was. But, as always with Prada, any literal connections between past and present were contradicted by other threads of thought. One was about big, puffy organdy skirts, and the other—which happened to yield the chicest blue-and-red patterned dress in the collection—was slim-knitted calf-length sheaths, a continuation of Prada's enduring love for sweater dressing. The latter proved that no matter how far she apparently diverges from the last season, this is a woman who never loses the plot.
24 September 2007
What a difference a few months make. The fashion cognoscenti may still be parsing the meaning of Miuccia Prada's challenging Fall show (spongy safety-orange twinset, anyone?), but the designer herself has moved on for resort. The collection, full of colorful floral prints and polka dots, can only be described as pretty. Prada tossed in a few retro pantsuits (think cropped-but-full trousers and matching shirt-jackets in safari khaki or an all-over bougainvillea pattern), but she mostly concentrated on skirts and dresses. The former came full and to the mid-calf, and were paired with ribbed T-shirts and polo tops. The latter appeared in witty retakes of the traditional cheongsam for day and in full-skirted, one-shoulder styles for evening. Where the collection really got playful was in the shoe department. A satin mule, its heel sculpted and painted to resemble a blooming rose, was an editor favorite.
9 July 2007
The audience was compelled to search for its seats in a twisty labyrinth—an experience some found frustrating enough to equate to the clothes they would later view—but right from the get-go, Miuccia Prada was simply prepping her public for a fashion master class in human vulnerability. It's getting harder for men to find their way in the world.Ergo, shut up and sit down.In her best men's collection in several seasons, Prada kept a tight focus on her view of the modern male. The more-boyish-and-interchangeable-than-ever models were a bit of a red herring. Their gladiator-style haircuts and wristbands (decorated with vintage watches!) were the giveaway. Prada had a vulnerable warrior on her mind—not exactly Russell Crowe, but someone who is attempting to reconcile expectation and inclination, hence a soundtrack that married classical piano to primal electronic pulse. The tailoring one expects from a Prada collection was more attenuated: the jacket lapel a shawl collar, the fitted leg expanding into a slight flare. The prints were splashy-but-muted poppylike florals, which eventually appeared in silk pajamalike combos. There were seventies-style geometric patterns that wouldn't have looked out of place on swingers' leisure suits. And, yes indeedy, there were the very jumpsuits on which they might have shown up.On paper, it's a challenging smorgasbord (you're probably wondering where the "vulnerable warrior" is in all of this), but it's always been Prada's peculiar skill to pose peculiar questions. She doesn't always bother to answer them—this time, the desirability of the clothes did it for her. And the company that famously made its fortune in bags and shoes can anticipate a bonzer season in accessory sales.
23 June 2007
Having to précis Prada is one of the toughest mind games in the business. All critics know is that they might as well leave their usual compasses at the door: Whatever Mrs. P is onto next is guaranteed to throw ready-made vocabulary and easy references into disarray. How, then, to capture the meaning of a show that started with a plain gray mannish coat and then moved into boxy, furry, laminated, bubbling, natural-cum-synthetic color and texture? Meaning, schmeaning, says Miuccia. As the anxious hordes pressed backstage for an intellectual coda from the oracle, she gave them a friendly Italian laugh. "Eh! The only thing I could think of was to work on color and materials," she shrugged. "Something simple but strange."Simple but strange: She said it. In a way, the schoolgirl coats, gray uniform cardigans and jumpers—and the sort of intransigently unsexy girl who wore them—seemed to be a return to the minimalist nineties character of Prada's early collections. Simple, but not quite: Some of the coats now have capelike slits where the sleeves should be, or a nice twenties slouch in the back, caught into a low half-belt. The strange? That came fast and furious with the addition of tufty mohair, first on the front of a cardigan, then as shaggy coats—this season's fur replacement. Then, to make it all the more complex, there was a running contradiction between rough-hewn primitivism (like raw-edged tan leather) and almost toxic plasticized orange, bright green, and off-turquoise, laminated onto spongy knits.Suffice to say, the color-blocking was brilliantly original, and further offset by the bonkers footless two-tone socks thrust into weird backward-curving cone heels. As for subtexts, one might be Mrs. Prada's penchant for walking holidays in the mountains—hence the socks, the woolly ski beanies, and, maybe, the extraordinary fabrics woven to change from black to bubbly outcrops of rocky brown and grass green. Was this an abstraction of screes and verdant slopes seen from afar? Oh, let's not get pretentious. As Miuccia Prada is the first to point out, it's all fashion—better processed by the eye than justified by any number of words. Just judge by the pictures, then. All you might want to factor in is this one extra, invisible subtext: a soundtrack of some very angry girls, chanting lines like "poke his eyes out." If Miuccia really did breathe in her inspiration with the alpine air, she didn't exactly come back withThe Sound of Music.
Instead, she created a collection that seems destined to be one of the pivotal influences of the season.
19 February 2007
Several seasons back, Miuccia Prada set womenswear afire with a collection that plumbed the heart of darkness underneath society's veneer of civilization. With her latest collection for men, she offered a cuddlier version of the same idea—somewhere between a caveman and a baby-boy doll," as she herself defined it in her typically cryptic way. What started out as a relatively straightforward search for a new silhouette ended up as an extraordinary torrent of big, fuzzy-fabric tops over narrow, uniformly stirrup-panted bottoms. Brightly colored angora tops—with matching angora leggings—are unlikely to make the average butch bloke's Fall 2007 wish list, but they cued Miuccia's musings on the status of the modern male.She seems to have settled on intense vulnerability as his Achilles heel. Hence a gutsy tweed duffel coat fading away in dégradé, or conservative flannels equally distressed in gradations from dark to light gray. Such effects were achieved by bleeding-edge fabric technology, which underscored Prada's unique knack for using industrial techniques to spark atavistic emotional responses. Whether the models were swathed in creamy teddy-bear plush or shaggy black fur, the key word was mutation, as the collection trawled a disorienting half-world between man and beast. And how many designers get you thinking like that?
14 January 2007
When Miuccia Prada is on form, only one thing's guaranteed: Whatever she did last season, she'll be the first to hate it, throw it out, and start somewhere else. Thus, fashion's most restless creative force has nixed the street-fighting toughie look she did for winter. In its place was a startling, destabilizing piece of extreme chic that flew directly in the face of all the current chatter about lightness, volume, and shades of beige.A turbaned girl in a burgundy duchesse ultrashort tunic—all bare legs and high heels—started the show off, swiftly followed by another in a purple, high-necked long-sleeved satin dress reaching below the knee. What was this? Why were nylon backpacks strapped to those tiny, bottom-skimming tops? Why were these looks interspersed with forties-looking, rounded-shoulder dresses, blouses, and slim pencil skirts? And why all the strong reds, oranges, and jewel-colored satins for summer?Because Prada felt like it. "I just wanted it to be about fashion," she shrugged backstage. "The importance of fashion." Still, this collection held an image of a powerful woman at its center, filtered through unmistakable references to Yves Saint Laurent (his "forties" collection from the seventies; a touch Loulou de la Falaise, to be precise). These were not random choices; in fact, they are two of the underlying constants in Prada's work. One thing she despises, though, is the overinterpretation of her motives; instinct and spontaneity guide her just as much as intellectual reasoning. She laughed at one journalist's anxious questioning about the short pieces, saying, "I just didn't like anything I did below the waist." Meaning, "Don't panic, these are tops." And, like everything else in this richly provocative show, they're going to look totally wearable in a store come spring.
25 September 2006
Nostalgia is a dirty word for Miuccia Prada, which helps explain why her recent collections have seemed like such deliberate breaks not only with her own past but with much of fashion history. Following her latest show, she talked about wanting to confront an increasingly complex future, a reasonably rational justification for the mixed messages sent out by her new menswear. The collection gloried in opposites: the formality of a tailored suit paired with woolly socks and sandals; dull felt vs. techno fabrics; long coats worn over shorts. Those coats looked almost sci-fi—one came in hazchem-yellow patent leather—but thanks to Velcro clasps at the back, they also flared out in a way that suggested ancient-samurai garb.The impressionistic interweaving of past, present, and future is something Miuccia has always excelled at. It's why her shows can occasionally feel like experiments in implanted memories, an idea which was expanded upon this time in the wall projections of ads for mock web sites (specially created by Rem Koolhaas's studio). The future they proposed looked a little dystopian, an impression underscored by the hard-edged electronic soundtrack and by the clothes themselves. There was little obvious luxury in the plainness of a felted smock top or a pair of printed-plastic shorts. Details were strictly utilitarian, like the tabs that closed the ankles on suit trousers (perfect for cyclists, when all the oil finally runs out). But what stuck in the mind was the flagrant, unyielding sheen of patent leather (purple blouson, orange shorts, green slip-ons): Here was the most obvious expression of Miuccia's confrontational refusal to wax nostalgic.
25 June 2006
There was no mistaking the new attitude that was unleashed at Prada for fall. It charged out of the gate, looking young, angry, sexy, and serious—and dressed to tackle real life. "I'm tired of being so sweet," declared Miuccia Prada. "We women should go back to strength—and the sober side. Stop trying to appeal to everyone, and go out into the world."As the woman who invented the lady look, Prada has a right to be the first to kill it off, and that she did, stone dead. Her models, dressed in short chunky gray sweater dresses, parkas, and signature towering platforms, carried briefcases and notebooks under their arms, as if hurrying on the way to some advanced seminar on contemporary politics. In the designer's words, "We should study."A young woman who wears a monochrome leopard-print coat with bristling fur sleeves, or a parka with an animal attached to its back is not looking to be taken as cute. Nor are her disconcerting layerings of corsetry over sweaters aimed at being come-hither. Still, in articulating a revolutionary wardrobe for this independent young thinker, Prada is only keeping true to herself. The elements—parkas, nylon raincoats, bombers, down-beat knits, lining-fabric skirts, and buttoned-up shirts—are actually the pieces on which she founded her business. The sporty pieces are shinier and more sharply glamorous, the coats come with fur clamped to the pockets, and the air of nineties techno-utility has disappeared. But in the end, this was Miuccia Prada calling up a side of her character that has always been there—a complex, questioning female intelligence, always up for confronting reality head-on.
20 February 2006
With this thrillingly prescient presentation, Miuccia Prada once again proved that she is peerless in her ability to distill current events into a fashion moment. Typically cryptic backstage, she said the show was about "men's forbidden dreams," foremost among them battle and hunting. Hence the video screens that ringed the catwalk, depicting a 15th-century painting of medieval warfare by Paolo Uccello that was chopped and changed so that it read like a 21st-century computer game. This face-off between ancient and modern, barbarism and "civilization," animated the collection.Quilting on a coat sleeve suggested antique garb. A shirt of leather chevrons with elbow pads looked like the sort of thing one would wear to joust, as did the knitted balaclavas, which stood in for knights' helmets. Shoes and boots were stamped with a heraldic pattern, and belts and bags were buckled with mythological griffins.If "men at war" was the big picture, ancillary themes were vulnerability and protection, the former emphasized by chests bared under sweaters or jackets, the latter by the doubling-up of coat over coat or blouson over blouson. The parade of morphing animal prints on shirts, ties, and outerwear was extracted from old paintings. Animal-printed fur also covered the crash helmets that were the show's favored accessory. However fantastical they sound, they were a reflection of the enduringly successful blend of creativity and commerce that grounds Prada. Everyone rides scooters in Italy, so everyone needs a helmet. Even the tricky-looking trouser with its cropped, tabbed ankle has market potential—Miuccia clearly feels her warriors are ready for a new silhouette.
16 January 2006
"I wanted to go forward by trying to cancel out nostalgia. By canceling out the body," said Miuccia Prada. She opened her search for new proportions with a big, loose, odd-looking overshirt, pulled over thick gray stockings. It wasn't exactly a shock, in the way Prada can sometimes be, but the impact of this show, with its strange whitewashed textures and oddly chosen combinations of gigantic platforms, high-heel gladiator boots, bamboo-sole wedges, and big shiny crocodile status bags, was hard to call. Was it fresh, plain, and girlish, or layered with high-tech innovations and original thought? Well, all of the above, naturally. Throwing people off the easy explanation is what Mrs. Prada does.Clean-skinned girls, neatly ponytailed and cyclamen-lipped, some of them with shiny patent eyeshades, opened the show wheeling stacks of luggage—the baggage of the Prada family heritage. The clothes—mainly dresses that fit loosely, denying the waist—seemed like velvet at first glance, but proved to be made of a kind of overprinted linen. A sequence of deflated puffed sleeves, outcrops of kilt pleats, and floppy falling-down shoulder lines looked borrowed from school uniforms, but without their requisite cuteness.If Mrs. Prada has an impulse to stride toward the future, though, she knows she can't go there without taking along the much-loved souvenirs of the past. Her plain lawn dresses incorporated the cutwork details of finely crafted tablecloths found in old Italian specialist shops. And for evening, she reverted to type, using minute wooden beads and strips of antiqued diamanté as decoration. All that looked simply lovely. Which leaves the explanations to another day.
26 September 2005
Is Miuccia Prada the fount of all things fashionable? Possibly not. But she continues to set the global style agenda in countless ways. Take the industry's current fascination with the dialogue between high and low (or class and mass). It's Prada who has made it almost conventional to combine a superbly tailored suit with something cheerfully and deliberately cheap—in this case, flashy pop motifs of stars and hearts. The contrast this season didn't have the romantic edge of last spring's naïf-printed mousseline, but the same high-low impulse was there, dictating, among other things, silver sneakers with a suit. And where the V neck over a collegiate-striped collar and tie would once have been cashmere, it was now served up in proletarian sweatshirting. Underscoring the sense of continuity with past seasons, Miuccia sent out gray trousers and a bomber jacket with a worn-looking, crinkled effect, and revisited the nylon backpack that made her fortune in the early '90s. As ever, she was ready with a cryptic subtext for the collection: "I'm tired of cover-ups, I'm in love with sleeveless," she said, by way of explaining the bare arms that were a recurrent theme.
27 June 2005
Even when there's nothing in the room, Miuccia Prada can send a powerful signal. For fall, she'd stripped her show space back to its bare industrial bones, and so it was with the collection. "To go back to something structured, strong, and womanly, to strip back on stupid frills, print, and decoration" was how she described her quest. "But," she added, "even though we are talking about minimalism again, it cannot be sad and depressing."Prada's opening declaration—a black wool Empire-line dress precisely seamed in a V under the bust and edged in lace at the knee—showed how skilled she is at navigating her way into a new mood. Tougher and darker, it still conveyed a shapely femininity—one that was concisely pulled together between the disciplined chic of a ballerina updo and a platform slingback. And dispensing with overdone surfaces revealed again what this designer stands for in terms of cut. Her top-seamed, sharp-lapelled, waist-defining coats, ballooning blousons, and swingy astrakhans showed an elegant command of volume gleaned from her lifelong obsession with couture classics.Some looks, like the mohair V-neck sweaters, belted over narrow skirts and worn with patent opera gloves, referenced Prada's own previous work: the wearable pieces that make women seek out this label season after season. But she avoided nineties starkness with boldly modern roller prints on dresses and shirts, and quirky appliqués of crochet and passementerie on a series of coats. The magic is that none of this can be nailed down literally as retro or folkloric. And at a time when fashion is weary of theme shows, that's a quality that truly sets Prada apart.
20 February 2005
The visual cues for Miuccia Prada's fall collection were the film stills being projected on the walls of her show venue, from a couple of 1972 productions by cult B-movie director and Tarantino fave Fernando Di Leo. Their subversive spirit underlined Prada's work this season: The designer always has provocation on her mind, and as she said after the show, that provocation is now perversely to be found in the most classic clothes, because "everything else has been done."That explained why her new menswear placed the emphasis squarely on classic tailoring in subtly twisted tasteful tones. The opening passage—everything in camel—read like a manifesto, compounded later by an immaculate shearling car coat, a pale-blue topcoat, and a string of double-breasted suits. But Miuccia is congenitally incapable of playing it totally straight. So a tan leather suit took it all back to '72, and the Russian-style hats and folkish printed shirts were also a visual reminder of the days when well-heeled intellectuals indulged in a little "authentic" radical chic. Suede shoes came pre-scuffed, and even all that camel was clumsily pressed and worn with woolen mittens to rough up its polished perfection. Which brings us to the bags. "It's important not to do anything useless," declared Miuccia, so she offered capacious leather carryalls in a purple and teal so irresistible that backstage visitor Pharrell Williams insisted he'd be unable to leave Milan without them.
16 January 2005
Just when the whole fashion world has turned ladylike—thanks, of course, to Miuccia Prada—she's tossed it all in the air, looking for a certain freedom. "A vague idea of birds; birds of vanity, like peacocks, parrots, and swans," was a starting point in her restless search for change, she explained. "I also wanted to move toward something more young and sporty, tall and narrow."To bring the audience into her new reality, Prada stripped her familiar clean, boxed-in stage set down to the bare industrial walls, then projected Rem Koolhaas' mind-scrambling collage of live news images onto them. It was a lot to take in before the show even started—but that, one suspects, was exactly Prada's intention with the clothes, as well. There was so much going on, it was almost impossible to process at first sitting.In broad terms, the news from Prada included a different silhouette (short hemlines, worn mostly with flat sandals), a return to one of her favorite palettes (brown-ochre-rust), and as always, lots of artful eccentricity (peacock feathers, flowerpot hats, Bakelite digital watches). There was also a Jamaican dance hall vibe, with reggae on the sound system, Rasta stripes in the knitwear, and Caribbean crochet in the raffia hats and cardigan coats. The birds really took flight for night, in the form of skirts overlaid with peacock feathers, dresses covered with digitalized feather prints, and pretty chiffon gowns whose fanlike pleats hinted subtly at dove's wings.It seems surreal to say this was one of the plainer, simpler Prada collections we've seen for a long time. But for all the intellectual flights that went into this collection, that is perhaps Prada's most important point.
28 September 2004
If it is indeed true that no one wants a single head-to-toe designer look anymore, Miuccia Prada is ready for the challenge. Come spring 2005, her stores will be full of such a range of merch that it will seem scarcely possible it emanated from the same source. "Something for everyone" is generally a cop-out of a come-on, but in Prada's case, it's a great excuse to crowd her catwalk with everything from luxuriously fabricated suits to naïve-printed mousseline shirts to patchwork snakeskin slippers to chunky Bakelite brooches—sometimes in the same outfit.In other words, if you can't monopolize them, seduce them with choice. Here, that meant beautiful pinstripes next to abstract fish-and-yacht-printed shirts and belt-backed military jackets in worn denim (with a Che cap to sharpen the reference). As a catwalk exercise, the skating across styles and decades felt slightly schizo, but Prada's ever expanding knack for intertwining high and low culture meant that her show was never less than fascinating—and often much more.
27 June 2004
Audiences always arrive at Prada shows tingling with anticipation, braced for Miuccia Prada's next departure from the last season¿s plot. This time, she confounded expectation again, not by taking off in a new direction, but by developing the cache of ideas layered into her spring collection. That, of course, was famously about the fifties lady tourist, with an overlay of hippie-ish tie-dye among the circle skirts and knits. For winter, she took that same woman into new realms of intellectual exploration on the print front: back to the future, in fact."It was a dream of extreme romanticism," she said. "The idea of eighteenth-century painting, with video games. A romanticism between past and future." The cyber fantasy came in computer-generated prints on her signature big, puffy skirts and the odd quirky robot appliqué on gray T-shirts. Yet none of that seemed jarringly obtrusive in a collection that concentrated again on the in-and-out silhouette she established last season. For colder months, she¿s added more layers, adding in dip-dyed cable knits and buttonless cardigans betwixt tweeds and bejeweled fifties-style couture-like pieces. What held it all together, literally, were the cinched waists, circled in narrow grosgrain ribbon or with tie-on belts encrusted with sparkle.It was that idea of jeweling, on collars, belts, and fabric brooches, that added the news. In a brilliant leap, she transposed those crunchy patches of decoration onto fitted down jackets—a perfect conflation of old-world luxury with classic Prada techno fabric that stood as the symbol of the entire collection.
23 February 2004
Over almost a decade of ground-breaking experimentalism, Miuccia Prada has explored everything from irony to deliberate ugliness to intellectual subversion. She’s been there, done that, and has the souvenirs to prove it. For Spring 2004, the designer turned her attention to the stiffest fashion challenge of the day: how to make feminine, happily nostalgic clothes without rehashing the clichés of vintage?“It was about tourism and craftsmanship, many things,” she said of a show that revisited the optimistic fifties to bring back a full set of densely packed suitcases. Out tumbled every possible variation on the classic touring wardrobe: circle skirts printed with illustrated Mediterranean scenes, shirtwaists and Capri pants, sundresses and bathing suits, button-through skirts and lovely evening frocks, silk madras bras and little tulle full-skirted dance dresses.What set the collection apart were the subtle twists, like the way Prada will gently mess up fabric with dip-dye and tie-dye, turn seams inside out, or leave edges raw. Something in the proportion of her neat little tops, belted slightly above the waist, to the fullness and length of her skirts, to the height of her T-strap shoes or pumps, inexplicably excuses the silhouette from the frumpiness of the literal fifties line. Meanwhile, students of Pradaology will note that her sight-seeing tour also revisits some favorite landmarks of her own career: the silk pleated goddess dresses, fur tippets, and grosgrain ribbons tied as belts, all of seasons past. Just another layer of complexity in a beautiful collection that will have women all over the world clamoring, once again, to go where Miuccia leads.
30 September 2003
When the going gets tough, no one can cut an argument for great design with as much substance, conviction and richness of intelligence as Miuccia Prada. Using an unlikely mix of potentially dowdy British tweeds and men’s shirting, bright, lustrous William Morris prints, humble lining silks and deluxe furs and skins, she performed sheer alchemy to create a vision of high chic for hard times.Prada started by introducing a new cut—a funnel-neck coat with a yoke shoulder and raised, belted waist. Then she eked sexiness out of striped men’s shirts, pinstripe pants and pencil skirts in windowpane suiting fabric by showing them with satin platform slingbacks and a soupçon of the undone. A shirt came with a chopped-off raw sleeve. A black alligator coat was worn over just a shirt and a long, mannish sweater, looking as though the wearer had somehow forgotten her skirt—but fabulous just the same. Accessorized though they were to the last detail, with gloves and the season’s boxy bags hanging from leather and metal chains, the outfits all had an air of elegant off-hand improvisation.Part of this collection’s genius is that it has continuityandingenuity: all the hallmarks of Miuccia Prada's talent are on show. Take the way she has of ordaining the peculiar as newly desirable. This season it’s Willam Morris–by–way–of–Liberty flower prints, used as formfitting knee-length dresses, shirts and a deerstalker hat. Or her way of letting the uptight formality out of eveningwear with form-skimming dresses in unpressed lining silks or crinkled georgette, shown with fabric neck pieces (a continuation of Spring’s beaded jewelry). Visually and intellectually, this is a collection that hit the high notes. Post-show, Prada explained her endeavor to be “a desperate search for beauty as we wait for war.” Bad times or no, it's fashion guaranteed to make women desperate to shop.
27 February 2003
Miuccia Prada has trained the fashion world to expect—indeed, to crave—the unexpected from her shows. Even those audience members who came dressed head to toe in her winter “sex” collection were there to see which sharp new turn she would take next. They were not to be disappointed. The designer let her fall Helmut Newton-esque fantasy evaporate in favor of something much cleaner, rearranging all her hallmarks—a love of couture fabrics, an obsession with the ’60s, and the ability to appropriate ethnic touches and play with modernist cuts—as never before.She opened with bright, singing color: a neon-pink cheongsam shirt with an orange-sorbet short skirt, both in luxurious duchesse satin. And by accessorizing the look with sporty goggles, thrust on top of the head, and flat silver sandals, she steered well clear of any literal vintage reference. The same mind-set could be seen at work in a sequence of white T-shirt pieces decorated with patches of plastic beading, and in a pair of Bermudas cut from shiny couture-like brocade and worn with a racer-back tank. Prada reinvented jewelry, too, tying on flat leather breast pieces encrusted with plastic beads or fusing them into the necklines of bra-top jersey dresses.The best measure of the collection’s success was that nothing was complicated, despite the complex merging of sport, color, luxury and ’60s elements. Many designers have been grasping at these disparate themes for spring, but few have been able to filter them into anything as appealingly wearable as Prada’s short satin trenches and flippy, white elastic-waist dresses.
26 September 2002
Thank you, Miuccia Prada, for reminding us about sex. Tight skirts that show a woman’s shape, high crocodile boots, see-through macs, and models that are the antithesis of innocent waifs. All these factored into a collection that sent the fashion world spinning away from its current fixation with hippie peasant clichés.In a show that was densely layered with references to the history of fashion, Prada cut a strong, curvaceous and erotically charged line to give grown-ups a whole new reason to buy. From the moment Eva Herzigova appeared, silhouetted in a black nylon bomber jacket with fur sleeves and a black, wickedly seamed skirt, it was obvious Prada had her sights set on a new kind of adult sophistication. High-waisted tweed skirts, bomber jackets cut to show the waist, and blouses with stiff puffed sleeves signaled her belief in the power of a new, hard chic. Revisiting structured tailoring—which is where she began in the ’90s—was only one of her ideas. She also worked in duchesse satin, gathered at the neckline to emphasize breasts, Monroe-esque silk sunray pleats, and ’30s showgirl lingerie playsuits. Great oversized rubberized raincoats with inside-out seams and a black satin jockey cardigan with knit sleeves also stood out from what was a vast inventory of must-have items.Prada referenced many of her own past collections, from her bourgeois ladylike phase to her militaristic moments and her love of vintage lingerie. But her achievement was in making something inspiringly new out of confronting a personal taboo. “I was fed up with people saying I can’t do sexy clothes!” she stated backstage. It was said with a laugh, but the designer has done nothing less than change the fashion agenda overnight.
28 February 2002
Combining '50s notions of jet-set elegance with couturelike fabrics and exquisite ethnic references, Miuccia Prada triumphantly opened Milan fashion week.Set to a dreamy instrumental soundtrack, Prada's show began with tailored navy skirts, trousers with built-in, low-slung belts, silvery lattice-print shirts, and kittenish Sabrina heels. Then came an exquisite homage to vintage Chanel, with belted, gold-threaded bouclé dresses—just the kind of stunning little outfits Romy Schneider would have sported in the early '60s. Prada's pajama-style chemises with Turkish motifs projected nonchalant, understated chic; the pin-tucked frilly tops and skirts trimmed with a vertical ruffle strip referenced fashion's infatuation with all things romantic, but steered clear of clichés.As usual, Prada saved the best for last. In contrast to the dour palette that many designers have adopted lately, her runway positively dazzled. Nude tops and dresses were layered with lightweight, shimmering knits; paneled, imposing skirts glowed under crinkled gold tops and coppery brocade jackets. The result? A vision of bygone splendor that never devolved into gratuitous flash.
27 September 2001
The hard-edged, almost austere look that Miuccia Prada recently championed has clearly become a major influence this season, so it's not surprising that her Fall collection continued to push forth a no-nonsense, pared-down aesthetic.Working almost exclusively in dark gray, black and brown, Prada reworked some of the looks that first made Carnaby Street chic. Fur-trimmed, paneled coats with geometric fastenings worn over skintight leggings brought to mind a nouvelle Twiggy, as did the coquettish minidresses with bright orange trim. Steering clear of superficial connotations, Prada made sure to keep her collection varied. For every mod shift there was a long, pleated skirt, a flowing Empire-waist prairie robe or a smart capelet. A couple of copper-and-white swirl dresses, a plush everyday fur and several impeccable jackets spoke of understated cool, as did her all-important accessories. Patent Mary Janes and tall lace-up granny boots were worn with thick stockings, while enormous tan bags with extra-long straps swung nonchalantly at the hip.By veering away from excessive decoration and facile status references, Prada succeeded in creating a perfectly fashionable anti-fashion wardrobe.
28 February 2001
With her Spring presentation, Miuccia Prada left behind dainty, rarefied romanticism—and not a moment too soon. In one of her most hard-edged, sexy collections in years, Prada captured the '50s-by-way-of-the-'80s look that showed up on catwalks in New York and London, yet made it distinctly her own.The silhouette was pinched, manipulated and focused on voluminous black and gray pleated skirts, some featuring low-slung, studded waistbands. Tops were close to the body, often cropped or cinched at the waist with ribbed cummerbunds. Bursts of color livened up the mood: Yellow pencil skirts with red polos, green blazers with blue turtlenecks, and empire-waist shift dresses all had a slightly askew schoolmarm charm .At Prada, accessories are always as important as the clothes. The new graphic, brightly colored cone-heel pumps, some with fluorescent dabs of fuchsia and green, will surely be a hit with those who want to dip their toes in the '80s without going all the way.
1 October 2000
VH1/Vogue Fashion AwardsDesigner of the Year nominee Miuccia Prada showed a strikingly beautiful collection. Sharp suits with narrow shoulders, defined waists and flowing skirts captured the spirit of the presentation, which was all about polished elegance and classic sophistication. Inspired by a '40s silhouette, Prada relied on an understated and tasteful color scheme: chocolate and gray dominated, with occasional dashes of yellow and red. For evening, Prada showed sexy velvet dresses with floral appliqués and a few silver beaded gowns that were absolute showstoppers. And, of course, you can always rely on Prada for some of the best accessories on the market: Her open-toed heels and geometric bags were an instant hit with the fashion crowd.
20 February 2000
Miuccia Prada showed today what is certain to become one of the most influential and successful collections of the season. It was an exquisite show of chic and glamour, tempered by the designer's signature discretion. Burgundy shorts and sweaters, lipstick prints, polka dot shirts, leather skirts and boldly colored turtlenecks evoked a cosmopolitan panache not seen since the jet-set '70s and early '80s; some looks were accessorized with sizeable travel bags and large sunglasses. For those in search of the perfect summer robe, there were also demure, semi-transparent dresses with masterful pleats and lingerie-inspired detailing that begged for relaxed cocktails in the country. "The ABC of fashion," was how Prada summed up her collection. It is precisely this knack for endowing classic, seemingly normal clothes with masterful fashion sense that keeps her empire going—and the audience begging for more.
26 September 1999
Prada’s Spring 1999 presentation opened with a flurry of athletic looks and fanny packs that seemed to bear little relation to the exotic skins and mirror-strewn looks that closed the show. But there was a thread: Sports were an inspiration, Prada said at the time. “We have these evening dresses with mirrors, she explained, “and under there is this man’s shorts for swimming. So it’s mixed up in this way.” In the catalog accompanying the Met’s “Schiaparelliand Prada: Impossible Conversations” exhibition, the designer offered further insights into this memorable season.“The pieces that closed my Spring 1999 collection were embroidered with broken mirrors. They represented my interpretation of hippie fashions,” she said. “At the time there was a revival of hippie style, so the entire collection was an ironic comment on the current trend for hippie fashions. . . . My collection included all the cliché’s of hippie fashions such as mirrors and flowers, but totally destroyed them at the same time, in reality, it was the least hippie collection imaginable.”
8 October 1998
Miuccia Prada’s Spring 1998 show was full of neat shifts, ladylike suits, and camp-ready shirts and capris, many in crisp white suggesting that the designer was in a minimal mood—until one looked down. The models’ colored satin mules with Lucite heels spoke of sex (and retail pleasure) quite directly. Combining rough linen with rubber finished off with industrial Velcro closures that undercut the material’s usual fetishistic associations, the clothing, as always, invited engagement and exploration. Chez Prada, things are not always what they seem.
9 October 1997
“Everything is about lightness,” saidMiuccia Pradaof her Spring 1996 collection. Putting aside the house’s signature stiff-ish nylon, she sought out fabrics with more flou; traded prints for embroideries and jacquards; and deconstructed “a fitted 19th-century shape,” retaining its waist-centric silhouette while jettisoning its traditionally heavy structure. There were many, many sheer lingerie looks in a decidedly un-springlike palette of burgundy and navy, as well as touches of military tailoring. Despite the overwhelming number of see-through pieces (Instagram and its nipple ban had yet to be invented) and the models’ smoky eyes and slept-in, braided up-dos, the effect wasn’t bad girl, but ethereal and dreamy. It was a mood that Glen Luchford would re-create in theAmber Valletta–fronted ads he shot for the Spring 1997 season.
2 October 1996
Long before Silicon Valley gave the green light to the geek,Miuccia Pradadid. Her Spring 1996 show featured colors that hadn’t been considered attractive since the seventies—avocado greens, sludge browns. Then there were the mixed prints, some with a hand-drawn look, which were intended to clash. Everything was worn with clunky, awkward sandals, which, though quickly taken up by fashion folk, were the polar opposite of the sexy follow-me shoes that were otherwise so popular in the nineties. Which was exactly the point: Prada has made a career of challenging conventional, Barbie-perfect standards of beauty by exploring what she’s called “the good taste of bad taste.”
1 October 1995
Even beforePradabecame the “Official Supplier of the Italian Royal Household,” the luggage-maker and purveyor of luxury objects was favored by the gratin of European society. AfterMiucciatook over in 1978, Prada quietly became the go-to brand for the creative class and the fashion intelligentsia. The designer’s first “hit” wasn’t made of leather at all. It was a nylon backpack made of an industrial nylon used by the military for tents and parachutes, and despite its luxury price tag or perhaps because of it, it became a status symbol of the ’90s. Over time, Prada’s fans would learn to expect the unexpected, and that’s what she delivered for Spring 1995, using utilitarian nylon to revitalize the classic sheath. It shared the runway with tailored pieces and vintage-inspired, lingerie-style dresses. A platinum-hairedLinda Evangelistawore a floral-embroidered see-through halter number. Prada’s one concession to modesty was to layer her sweet temptations over tap pants.
6 October 1994
Miuccia Pradais a woman loyal to her obsessions; references to uniforms, lingerie, 1950s couture, and even childrenswear (her wedding dress was made by a kid’s clothing-maker) often reoccur in her work. Knit-mad for Spring 1994, Prada showed a dizzying range of looks. There were midriff-baring military styles, nightgowns and slip dresses, denim “Mao” jackets, pleated “goddess” numbers, and a group of ink-blue velvet pieces that wouldn’t have looked out of place in an Edwardian boudoir. The cast of catwalkers included the tattooed mechanic-turned-model Jenny Shimizu, BritishVoguettePlum Sykes, and a gaggle of aristos including Lady Amanda Harlech and Honor Fraser.
5 October 1993
While rock-obsessed New York designers were promoting grunge on their runways, the Milanese were falling for the Summer of Love. EvenMiuccia Pradafelt the vibe, opening her Spring 1993 show with topstitched suedes and leather daisy belts and chokers. If Haight-Ashbury informed the first third of the show, the rest was geared to an island getaway at a tony resort. There were bathing suits and cover-ups, shifts with cutout stars, fringed linen maxi dresses, as well as dramatic showstoppers like a sexy raffia crochet gown. The finale consisted of fringed pieces, including some haute hula-like skirts.
6 October 1992
Having taken over her family business in 1978, by the early ’90sMiuccia Pradawas earning a reputation as a fashion maverick, one who subtly subverted fashion codes. Subtle is the operative word for her ladylike Spring 1992 show in which models wore bouffants and gloves in the manner of Jacqueline Kennedy andBrigitte Bardot(cue blonde Karen Mulder in a headscarf). “I like to link the future with the past,” the designer toldVogue, which reported that the designer was “inspired by the crisp fabrics and tailoring of 1950s and 1960s haute couture.”
8 October 1991