Men’s – Skimpy, Gritty, Modern Sensuality. Prada SS24

June 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

(To experience the full version of this collage, check out my Instagram!)

It’s Prada day, meaning: a polarizing collection that makes everything else happening in Milan feel blunt and plain. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a menswear collection that can’t be easily classified in a couple of words. It’s utilitarian, but super-sensual, gritty, but somehow also polished, oversized, but skimpy too. You kind of want to hate it at first, but then… you get it. 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 the alien in Alien, or a snail, or humans… after having a good time. “Now, in this time, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas,” Mrs. Prada afterwards. 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. “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,” concluded Simons. 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. 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 at DSquared2 this menswear season. Masculine sexuality, of whatever flavor and inclination, is coursing through the runways of Milan once more.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Perversely Chic. Miu Miu AW23

March 8, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Miu Miu shut down Paris Fashion Week with a bang. Or even the entire season! This was a remarkable collection that felt desirable and intriguing, sexy and perversely chic, absolutely timeless and completely relevant. Miuccia Prada (with Lotta Volkova’s brilliant styling support) satisfied all the possible needs of a Miu Miu girl-slash-woman. The show was opened by the modern-day indie-film leading-actress Mia Goth, who wore a prim grey cardigan and polka-dot-printed skirt, all ladylike in kitten-heel sling-backs and a matching handbag draped over her arm. Her hair was kind of messy, and her tights were pulled up over her top. That’s the look that will define this season in fashion. To a frantic jazz soundtrack, other models wore ensembles that had a sense of spontaneous, impulsive layering and romantic urgency. Prada wrapped an infectious sentiment of youth into a Miu Miu collection that read like the ultimate shopping list for the autumn 2023 wardrobe. Emma Corrin’s finale look – a beige turtleneck and heavily embellished, gold panties – represented the candid, youthful, independent persona Miuccia Prada is creating for. The message was reinforced by the genderless philosophy Prada has been introducing at Miu Miu by way of male casting. With its ironic sense of humor, the Miu Miu collection uplifted its audience, because it cut a contrast to a season that’s reflected a less uplifting reality. With that in mind, the reduced Miu Miu silhouette and quiet colors also evoked a wartime sensibility. “A little serious,” Prada said. “I like to embrace that in this moment. Maybe I’m too careful about what’s happening around us, but I can’t leave fashion like some place of nonsense. There’s some excitement and sexiness there,” she paused. “But basically, I think we have to dress for thinking. And for starting fresh.” Oui, oui, oui!

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Recycling Beauty. Prada AW23

February 24, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Finally, my heart skipped a beat for the first time this fashion month. Prada‘s autumn-winter 2023 collection – entitled “Recycling Beauty” – was a strikingly powerful take on simplicity and the idea of uniform, with a twist of much-needed optimism. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have reached full synthesis, as this collection takes the unmistakable Prada look to a new dimension. The white lily pin, folded origami style from humble cotton, that came with Prada’s invitation looked like hope for the future. That notion seemed to be confirmed backstage, where Miuccia and Raf 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. 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 – never seen such gracious and refined interpretation of this type of jacket – came with elegant Watteau backs or were puffed into couture-like 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 1950s 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. This persuasive, deeply moving collection provided much food for thought, and a heaping serving of new things to want to wear.

Collages by Edward Kanarecki.
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Men’s – Let’s Talk About Clothes. Prada AW23

January 16, 2023January 17, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Whenever Prada delivers a collection this stern and reductive, you can expect a recession, economic crisis or a global disaster to happen in the near future. But since the last couple of years feel like a 24/7 state of being at verge of the world’s end, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons‘ extremely minimal and modest-looking outing might foreshadow the ultimate dystopia. Or maybe not? Maybe these are investment pieces for a yet unknown utopia?

The collection was entitled “Let’s Talk About Clothes“. The show was held in a Fondazione space pared back as never before, right down to its poured concrete bones. Above the guests’ head was installed a sunken roof of plasterboard in the same sludgy tone, about a meter above their heads. During the show it slowly rose, until sinking again at the finale. Clothes-wise, it was really about 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 along with comfort and warmth. 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 equivalent piumino version 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 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 of several assumptions at once relating to work, class, and gender.