review from wwd
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Prada Fall 2007 Collection
02/20 06:30pm
Maybe Miuccia Prada gets too much credit. Who else could get away with sending out hair shirts seemingly made from old faux-fur toilet seat cozies and mannish oversized coats with their sleeves yanked off, only to be thought a genius? Perhaps the more appropriate question is, who else would try?
In a city where deep fashion thoughts, or for that matter, cute, skippy fashion thoughts, are at a premium, Prada makes us think. And to be honest, even after considerable Rodin-channeling, the collection she showed on Tuesday still made for complicated rumination. Was there an eco statement in the endless fur that was really in disguise? Did the message somehow tie into the Rem Koolhaus installation with its Styrofoam block seats left over from men’s?
“Fake classic, that’s how I define the collection,” Prada said after the show. “I wanted to keep to simple shapes, and when you do that you need to work on the colors and fabrics.”
The silhouettes were simple indeed and at times fake simple, as with the mannish coats that looked so familiar coming but caught you by surprise going, thanks to the blouson-and-half-belt effect that settled across the posterior. There were boyfriend cardigans, shift and sack dresses and Plain Jane shell-and-skirt motifs. Everything was shown with two-toned ribbed knee socks that were actually footless, and often topped off with little knitted caps.
But mundane? Hardly. As the designer noted, low-key shapes call for major fabric intrigue and in that area Prada amazed. Incredible work went into her materials, as she will be the first to let you know. “There was a huge research. They’re superexpensive,” she said. They looked it: the mohair fur; boiled mohair knits with silk overlay; bonded wools and silks that were pulled away in spots to create puckering; madcap plastic fringe that looked like some kind of throw-away brazenly recycled.
As in her urban-crusader collection of a year ago, most of the fabrics were
plenty weighty. But while then Prada went all dark, here she opted for a broader palette of hues pilfered from her far-flung travels. There were pretty pairings of nude with blush pink; ombrés shaded from mulberry pink to orange or taupe to emerald green, and some caustic combos of orange and blue.
In fact, some of the more caustic combinations and minimalist shapes harkened back to the designer’s mid-Nineties work.
Yet nothing looked retro. Rather, this was a confounding manipulation of
classics — both her own and those in fashion’s public domain — into something that looked like nothing else. But then such is the genius of Prada, even when it’s too much genius to fully figure out.
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I always have a hard time to understand if the critic like the collection or not after seeing a review, and same as this one. Can anyone tell me the wwd journalist like the show or not. I think he(she) like it, isn't it?