If there’s a designer you can count on, it’s Miuccia Prada. For two reasons. She will always deliver intelligent, multi-faceted fashion. And will take a grip of the contemporary matters like no other. Her men’s autumn-winter 2019 and women’s pre-fall 2019 was a dark outing. Well, why would it be optimistic? Today’s world is a bad place. Europe suffers from the rise of rightist governments. There are absolutely no reasons to be happy with Trump, just as with Macron, Brexit and Putin’s actions over Ukraine. Paweł Adamowicz, the liberal mayor of Gdansk, Poland, was brutally stabbed yesterday at a charity concert, and his death is all over the news today. Of course, mentioning such politically-charged tragedies next to fashion might sound completely out of one’s mind. But not in case of Miuccia, who acknowledges the world as it is and wants her viewers to be, at least, aware.

While military elements often come as fashion fads, the ones that appeared at Prada looked serious. They are the brand’s codes since the 90s – if you’re an observant Prada fan, you will have this raw, defiant ‘image’ in your head. Some of the models looked vulnerable with their pale torsos exposed. Others seemed to be even invisible in their grey, loosely fitted suits. The big crotchet heart, attached with a safety-pin to the blazers, was a simple, but beautiful metaphor of a heart that’s still beating, yet insecure and… terrified. “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… It was set against a very tough world—that is why war and military was in the air,” the designer explained. Of course, there were – at a first glance – brighter details that made the collection digestible from a solely visual perspective. Which is completely understandable, as it’s a Prada fashion collection, after all, not a poetic Ann Demeulemeester line-up from the early 2000s or some soft of art performance. Although, I guess, Miuccia might wish for having that freedom. “To make it not boring and for the fashion – because fashion has to be light somehow – we borrowed the symbols of trashy horror movies. From ‘Frankenstein’ to ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and all those movies. Frankenstein is the example of the monster with a big, big heart who searches for love.” The heart’s still beating.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.