style.comTim Blanks
June 21, 2015
Miuccia Prada has hardly done her male clientele a service by showing her Spring collection for men alongside her Resort collection for women. "Women beat men to zero," she conceded cheerfully after her latest exercise in a catwalk marriage of the genders. But, with this show at least, Mrs. P. added some perverse new shadings to the relationship between men and women in her universe.
We take it for granted that women rule. Here, there was scrupulous attention paid to the details of their presentation, the cat-eye makeup and kitten heel with a sock instantly transporting us back to Chicklette and Concetta, John Waters' icons of bad-girl defiance from his 1974 work of genius, Female Trouble. These troublemakers have made their presence felt in Miuccia's world more than once. Today, the niceties of their early-'60s wardrobe—skirts pleated and pencil, sweaters second-skin and striped, mini shifts a-go-go—were extravagantly translated in leather and snakeskin. Gorgeous coats covered in paillettes, a waiting list candidate if ever there was one, suggested that a life of crime pays plenty well. But—here's where it got really perverse—these women were cast as almost maternal in comparison to the boys that Prada paraded.
In their topstitched shorts and little zipped mock turtles and shirts part-tucked in, the boys were kids in a hurry. They had racing cars and rocket ships and Energizer Bunnies on their sweaters, a different kind of go-go from the girls. Mrs. Prada insisted she has never liked the notion of expressing an idea on a shirt. Symbols make her nervous. So she deliberately opted for the innocent iconography of boyhood. Except there is never really innocence with Prada, a point she reinforced by using the same racing cars and rocket ships on her womenswear. There was a very Big Brother eye here. You are being watched. There are no secrets. For that matter, cutting a boy's short shorts out of leather also underscored the impossibility of innocence.
Regular visitors to Style.com know the pleasure we derive from analyzing the very particular food and drink Prada serves at every show. Today's ice lollies and whipped Pecorino suggested seaside family treats. The Negronis, on the other hand, were boozy adulthood. All Miuccia Prada has to do is put it out there. Now you make as much of it as you will.
wwd.comPrada Men’s RTW Spring 2016
By Miles Socha
“When you’re a luxury brand, you can’t show a T-shirt,” Miuccia Prada declared after her spring show — a coed affair that may forever be remembered as the rabbit collection, given how that animal appeared on everything from crewneck sweaters to swingy snakeskin coats.
Yet a T-shirt — which can be a billboard for brands, beliefs, artworks or jokes — was among the starting points for a diverse and thought-provoking collection that the designer described as “post-modest,” as well as post-industrial and post-Pop. Backstage, Prada cited a desire to temper the culture’s current imperative to be bold and impressive with something more “human and real.”
For the men, tailoring was the anchor, in contrast to the slouchy leisure togs dominating many other runways. Sport jackets, dusters and topcoats were trim, breezy and unlined, made distinctive with contrast stitching and the freewheeling way Prada paired them with risqué short shorts. Zip-neck racer knits and filmy silk shirts, meanwhile, boasted naïve graphics representing that long-eared creature, or race cars.
The latter motif mushroomed into pants and zippered blousons resembling pilots’ uniforms, banded or piped in safety orange and patched with utility pockets. The daring shorts — the more naked, the more human, Prada reasoned backstage — also came in leather, shown with plunging tanks or boxy, zippered jackets.
Both sexes wore quirky sweaters melding Breton stripes with rabbits, race cars, rockets, eyeballs and arrows. Yet the women’s looks were more cacophonous, and outshone the fellas. Prada splashed the offbeat symbols with punk abandon on short, glossy slip dresses and rompers with heavy chain straps — even her fetish pleated skirts. Some coats and dresses were further spangled, to breathtaking effect, with shiny plastic discs, which echoed the show set: an elaborate ceiling of geometric stalactites in clear fiberglass and silvery polycarbonate.
Everything seemed to rally against the adage that modesty is the best policy.
Seriously Miuccia?When you’re a luxury brand, you can’t show a T-shirt