Miuccia Prada

They Are ON Fire. Miu Miu AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

The Miu Miu girls (and boys) are on fire! It was only fitting that Miu Miu would have the final say this season – thanks to a change in the traditional schedule, the show rang out a month of collections, for which its last proposal set the tone in a big way. Other than Balenciaga, no brand has been as impactful as Miu Miu on the silhouette we’ve encountered on daily runways over the last four weeks: an oversized blazer or coat worn over a lingerie element and a mini- or evening skirt. This season, Miuccia Prada reiterated that influence in a collection that continued where the last one left off, reminding the industry who got the idea in the first place. The winter embodiment of the Miu Miu muse was less of a workaholic and more of a sports freak. After disrupting archaic office dress codes last season, she set her sights on the tennis court, giving Wimbledon officials more than they bargained for in super-short, low-riding Y2K skirts and tops with cheekily placed see-through lace panels. She didn’t care if it was winter because she’s too hot to get cold. Memories from her junior ballet phase (she outgrew it) manifested in ballerinas and knitted socks before her inner rebel really took over and things went hell for leather. As the same theme appeared in new variations – shearling, snakeskin-printed or stained leather, with faux-fur lapels – a more gender-diverse expression of the Miu Miu person took shape, demonstrating how the skimpy silhouette also works on nonbinary and traditionally masculine physiques. Along with every fashion girl and their mother this month, men have been wearing last season’s cropped Miu Miu cable knits and little jackets to the shows. This time, there was new material for them to obsess over: lace-up leather trousers, big buckle boots, and some prettily encrusted sheer crystal dresses, if there’s time for a drink after tennis. Miu Miu closed its menswear line in early 2000s, and 2022 feels like the year to revive it.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

NET-A-PORTER Limited

Will It Make Sense? Prada AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

As Russia is invading Ukraine and Europe is at the brink of war, it’s really hard to look at the latest Milan Fashion Week collections. Suddenly, fashion’s frivolity feels ignorant and insensitive, and the smiley street-style faces make you wonder if there are two parallel realities existing simultaneously. Still, one can’t blame Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons for staging a fashion show yesterday, as if nothing wrong was going on the other side of the continent. How could they know that on the same day, Putin would commit a war crime? The situation is getting more and more turbulent with every hour, and as brands in Milan do business as usual (even though at least some symbolic gestures of solidarity would be more than welcomed and appreciated), who knows if this isn’t the last fashion month for a long time to come. Trying to stay hopeful, but I’m really terrified of what might happen next.

I wish the circumstances wouldn’t make this Prada line-up feel somehow unfortunate and badly timed. The collection is beautiful, yet will it make any sense in the near future? The designers’ offering started with 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. 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 Euphoria‘s Hunter Schafer. As has become their practice, Prada and Simons were looking back at past Prada collections, embracing the Prada-ness. “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 – look intriguing.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Men’s – Cosmic Dandy. Prada AW22

| Design & Culture by Ed

For autumn-winter 2022, Prada “ate” (that’s how TikTok kids communicate that something is absolutely brilliant). There are two reasons why this collection, which opens the fourth season of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons‘ ever-exciting creative dialogue, is truly mind-blowing. Exactly 10 years ago, Prada invited some of her favorite actors to walk the runway, from Adrien Brody and Gary Oldman to Willem Dafoe and Tim Roth. That 2012 collection was a refined, at points ironic, take on the Old World elegance. In 2022, the brand invited a new pack of actors, with Kyle Maclachlan opening (he’s definitely Team Raf – this is the ultimate Calvin Klein 205W39NYC guy!) and Jeff Goldblum closing the show (the Prada-print-loving-Insta-Zaddy is an obvious Team Miuccia choice). All the men that were casted for the show walked out of an “A Space Odyssey“-like entrance, wearing garments that can be described with two words: “cosmic” and “dandy”. The line-up focuses mainly on investment tailoring and voluminous outerwear. Exaggerated shoulders and faux-fur patches in unexpected colours are this season’s key take-aways, and I really loved how Prada and Simons managed to make this futuristic style feel elegant (please, lets have a major comeback of elegance in menswear!). You could see how these garments elevated the movements of the models. And Goldblum looked utterly alien-chic in his long, black coat. There were also nylon boiler-suits, plenty of rubber-ish leather and a great selection of color-block turtlenecks. The Internet, as always, debates whether this collection is more Miuccia or Raf. To me, it’s a balance, which wasn’t always present in their previous creative endeavors.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Miu Angst. Miu Miu SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

Miu Miu went hardcore Miu Miu for spring-summer 2022, and this is the best thing that could happen to us this season. There’s a strange correlation going on: the more complex and sometimes over-worked Miuccia Prada‘s main line becomes with Raf Simons, the better and desiable Miu Miu gets. Miuccia’s Paris-based label seems to be going through some sort of unapologetic renaissance. This time, the Miu Miu girl – who might equally be a mature woman – goes through a teenage angst phase. Imagine being in your mid-twenties when the pandemic hit, just about to make your debut on the corporate scene; your pressed skirt suit, ironed shirt and unwrapped nylons left abandoned in your closet for what felt like an eternity. When the world reopens and WFH is replaced with IRL, will you pull out that dusty uniform as if nothing happened? Or did something change within you? For Miuccia Prada, it’s a no-brainer. When it comes to the age groups whose formative experiences were interrupted by the lockdown period, continuing on the same track as the generations before them is no longer a given. If the seismic events of the last year-and-a-half taught young people anything, it’s to question those values, norms, and, indeed, dress codes. When the Miu Miu woman returns to the office, she’s chopping up all of those preordained rules, quite literally. Today, Prada marked her own return to the office by seating her guests in ergonomic work chairs and treating us to a back-to-work wardrobe for the post-pandemic age. Like rebellious private school kids cutting up their uniforms, she shortened the length of corporate skirts and tops – frayed edges in tow – until there was barely anything left to crop. It was as if waistlines and skirt hems – and necklines and top hems – had a magnetic attraction to one another, drawing ever closer as the show progressed. Midriffs were elongated to a degree that would have made Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera collectively blush in the early 2000s, if, of course, the very sight of those low-riding baggy trousers wouldn’t have made them faint first. In the process, miniskirts migrated into top territory and morphed into belted bandeaus, and someone came to work in just a beige bra and a matching pencil skirt, the elastic band of her underwear poking out. All this, mind you, in the fabrics of a businesswoman’s wardrobe. Prada hasn’t been doing post-show interviews this season due to Covid-19, but she did grace us with a few well-chosen words: “It’s so normal, but for me it’s so strange. Strange is not strange anymore,” she said with a shrug, and toiled on with her celebrity greetings. Certainly the new generations seem unfazed by the overt sexiness of the post-lockdown mentality. In case there are any apprehensive dressers left in this ‘new sexy’ climate, Prada did throw in some very viable new alternatives to the corporate wardrobe. Cable knit skirts with high slits worn with shirts and faded oversized knits made for a realistic take on ‘the generational suit,’ as did a stone-washed leather blouson with a matching box-pleat skirt. With Miu Miu’s angsty take on women’s business dressing, it’s exciting to see how those styling tricks trickle down to real wardrobes in near future.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

L’Amant Double. Prada SS22

| Design & Culture by Ed

The Prada spring-summer 2022 show was the first chance to see Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ work on an IRL catwalk. 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. As Simons put it, it’s about connecting the world. Clothes-wise, I’ve never been so on fence with a Prada line-up, but I guess if a collection this season makes you question things, then it does the work. 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 COVID-19 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. The hard/soft interplay of raw or distressed leather jackets and tiny duchesse satin miniskirts trailing trains counted as the collection’s most talked about details. Well, I can’t stand those trains, and I feel like they’ve polarized the entire industry. It’s not easy to redefine sexy, as we’ve seen elsewhere this week. Does this word even mean anything in fashion today? Miuccia and Raf did “sexy” in the Prada-ist “ugly chic” manner, balancing cumbersome and sleek, lace with leather, the wrapped and the untied.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.