“Trying to build a new kind of elegance — but for now,” Miuccia Prada said above the backstage din after a Prada show that took an agnostic stance toward the occasion, function and purpose of garments.
About occasions, she and Raf Simons opened their show with uniforms, pairing short-sleeve military shirts and sharply pleated trousers with elbow-length gloves and spangled kitten heels. A night at the opera? Or a night shift as a security guard?
On function, bra tops — which are all over Milan runways — were reduced to drifting bits of chiffon, skirts to sheer tubes held aloft with filmy suspenders. Great for pictures and social media, but…
On purpose, she and Simons, her co-creative director, even seemed to question if clothes are meant to flatter in all instances.
Here, they didn’t, but the mashups held your attention as familiar archetypes were styled or morphed into something new.
Preppy polo shirts with chest emblems were supersized and stiffened into grandiose coats, or flaring cardigans. Loose cocktail dresses with jeweled collars were worn with the offhand attitude of a sweatshirt under rugged leather coats.
Meanwhile skirts, perhaps the most Prada garment of all, came in bubble, pleated and pencil variations, or sometimes elements of kilts, dirndls and evening lace jumbled together, the various panels tied up neatly with a grosgrain ribbon.
This show will also be remembered for the bold and freewheeling color, from the vast, glossy tangerine floor laid out at the Prada Foundation runway theater to the vivid shades employed for shirts, flaring dresses and some outerwear, like a searing yellow coach jacket.
“We talked a lot about freedom, but also freedom in the way you think about getting dressed,” Simons said backstage, citing as an example the hippie trope of tossing an army jacket over a floral dress. “A woman can feel as amazing, free, chic and luxurious in a uniform as in a dress.”
Invariably, Prada and Simons were asked how their designs relate to current affairs.
In prepared quotes distributed after the show, Prada said the collection “is about reacting to the uncertain — clothes that can shift, change, adapt.”
Backstage, Simons allowed that “one of the things that we found very challenging is that the world is so hardcore now, but there is still so much beauty. And you have to deal with this one way or another.”
In a world tilting toward authoritarianism, and amid an Italian season teetering between minimal and maximal, their anything-goes approach felt oddly soothing.