Prada – The New Country Living
Godfrey Deeny
March 01st, 2009 @ 6:17 PM - Milan
If there was one message that’s emerged this weekend at the Milan women’s ready-to-wear season for fall 2009 it is that the era of permanent partying is over, and nowhere was that tidal change better expressed than at Prada this Sunday evening.
Italy’s most influential designer Miuccia Prada made the point clear in the opening looks, a series of rugged wool coats and suits in colors like russet, oak and mustard. And if you still did not get it, she made her casting wear rubber waders, albeit with stacked platform designs. None of the models carried fishing rods, but they did don thick rural socks, their hair wind blown from a riverside stroll.
Miuccia also studiously avoided the whole Eighties revival. While half the shows in Milan featured power shoulders, she kept her silhouette leaner, and most of her dresses were sleeveless. And rarely have we seen so much fur in Milan, and also in Prada, as designers look to renewable materials in an era that demands protection.
No Prada collection is complete without a touch of the baroque, this time present in some stacked court shoes with studded back fans, but above all in jade crystal flowers scattered across mink shift dresses and leather sheaths.
“It’s all about the death of the nightclub,” Miuccia told FWD backstage. “And about a new desire for a rural retreat, where clothes are strong and sturdy.”
But if the Prada woman for fall is anything she is heroic, best exemplified by the brilliant finale where a casting of a new generation of models marched out in dresses of tough leather vertical strips and posed like a determined style regiment amidst the black scaffolding and wood mini mountain bleachers stage set that is the current Prada show set. Call it Joan of Arc meets Gladiator.
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