In honor of our March cover star Miuccia Prada, Vogue editors nominated their favorite Prada shows. It wasn’t an easy task, there are over 100 Prada collections on Vogue Runway (women’s, men’s, pre-seasons), but we were asked to choose, and choose we did. The list below says as much about Prada herself as it does about us. As Wendell Steavenson wrote in her profile of the designer, “she is less interested in exploring fashion as a kind of gendered costuming than she is in allowing people to find their own way of expressing themselves.” As Prada put it to her, “we should be able to be who we choose to be, always.” Read on for Vogue’s list of our most unforgettable Prada shows.
Virginia Smith, Global Head of Fashion Network
Fall 2003 was my second Prada show as an editor at Vogue. The collection was a perfect blend of menswear tweeds, shirtings, and William Morris prints for an uber-chic offhand attitude. She had me at look #1 as the most perfect funnel neck coat appeared on the runway. I loved it, bought it, and it s still in my closet 20 years later....
Mark Guiducci, Creative Editorial Director
The Spring 2008 show, universally known as the Fairy Collection, achieved that uniquely Prada sentiment of, “What is that? I like it.” The pieces featuring James Jean drawings—Ossie Clark, meet Fern Gully—have subsequently become cult classics and spotting one in the wild is a kind of fashion ornithology. I once threw a party to which Prada obsessive Colby Mugrabi wore a Fairy dress (Look 22, to be exact) simply because it would make me happy to see.
Nicole Phelps, Global Director of Vogue Runway
Miuccia Prada’s fall 2013 show is seared in my memory, partly because it was so cinematic (the music from Betty Blue played on the soundtrack and videos were projected onto the walls) and partly because it was so sexy, which was rather against-type. She’s the woman who dreamed up ugly chic, after all. Of course, there’s nothing conventional about Prada’s sexy. Only she could make boiled wool look sultry. I defy you to find a woman who was there who didn’t want to be Cat McNeil in this peeling-off-the-shoulder dress.
Mark Holgate, Global Network Lead and US Fashion Features Director
Pick your favorite Prada collection, they asked, and my response is: Where do you even start? So I decided to start at the start—well, my start, which would be spring 1995. I was already well aware of the brand before that, but something about this particular show really caught my eye—and captured my heart. I mean, that opening look: Naomi, in a stricter-than-strict black suit, cinched even closer to the gods with a white webbing belt, which was centered with a gleaming logoed silver buckle. Then onto nylon dresses, transparency, industrial strength zippers, rib knits, and purses that would have been really truly prim if it weren’t for their plastic-y sheerness—and all this worn by a hyper mid-’90s cast of Kate, Linda, Brandi, Trish, Shalom, Amber, and Nadja. Prada Spring 1995 is to me absolute perfection, a primer of what an era-defining vision of minimalism could mean in terms of looks and ideas and ultimately creative longevity. It so moved me that around the same time it appeared I scraped together the money, fresh out of college and living on a shoestring in London, to venture into the Browns boutique on South Molton Street to buy a Prada men’s black neoprene coat. The sales assistant I bought it from asked me out on a date. I didn’t end up going on that date, and I sadly no longer have the coat, but I have never lost my love for this collection.
Francesca Ragazzi, Head of Editorial Content, Vogue Italia
I’m digging into the ’60 and ’70 these days to find threads that can lead me to today, when we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Vogue Italia. This collection will always give me the vitality of the women of that time, their fight for emancipation, their dreams and their attitude in a country, Italy, full of enthusiasm for the cinematic approach of Visconti, Fellini, and Monica Vitti. And because clothes are pills of life, it brings me back to my years in New York, not even 30, before the pandemic, an exciting time where one thing counted: The now.
Sarah Mower, Vogue Runway Contributor
I remember getting that nauseous sensation, the one where your stomach turns upside down, when you know you’re witnessing a fashion revolution taking place. Miuccia Prada’s ‘Bad Taste’ collection was so shockingly different to both droopy washed-out grunge and stark monochrome minimalism—the two fashionable pieties of the time—that it made a lot of older reactionaries sick. That was probably because, being ’70s people, they shunned the embarrassment of purple, brown and avocado green, were offended by the mid-century modern wallpaper-ish prints and horrified by Miuccia’s hint that this might be double-knit jersey she was using—the synthetic-looking kind more commonly associated with flight attendant uniforms (the epaulettes underlined it). Plus: the horror of the knee-length ‘frump’ length! The ‘ugly’ sandals!
We ’90s people, however, were breathless converts in a heartbeat. It was funny, it was ironic, and—with the help of Kristen, Kate, Stella, Trish and all that incredibly cool gang of It-models—it was what we wanted to wear on the spot. I remember thinking, too, that it was the first time Prada had totally cemented her vision—bourgeois, but subversive. We knew who she was from then on. It was the first time she showed her no-pants look; or rather, big underpants as outerwear, which she’s returned to again and again. Go through her entire body of work, and you’ll often find her quoting from this collection. It must be close to her heart—as it was to ours.
Luke Leitch, Vogue Runway Contributor
The canon of seminal Prada womenswear shows—The Best of Miuccia—is written in fashion lore. This nomination, however, is pitched at those who favor B-sides and Rarities. For a few invigorating years in the 2010s (and maybe during other Prada periods I wasn’t present for) the menswear mainline would be shown alongside resort or pre-fall, season depending. As Miuccia Prada told us before 2015’s topstitch-issimo spring menswear/resort womenswear: “Anytime I do a men’s show, I’m thinking this would be fantastic for women—or at least for me. And more and more, it feels instinctively right to translate the same idea for both genders.” A year earlier, her Menacing Paradise show remixed the Garden of Eden myth into South Pacific via Heart of Darkness—phew!—and was to my mind the most interesting Aloha-inflected collection the runways have ever seen. Check out those B-sides!
Tiziana Cardini, Vogue Runway Contributor
Disclosure: I’ve never met a Prada collection I didn’t like—I’ve been a fan since the Pleistocene. My wardrobe is sort of a mini-archive—and nothing ever goes on resale. I’ve seen almost all of Miuccia’s collections. So I’m a certified Prada-phile, and not just because I’m Milanese—or maybe precisely because of that. That said, one of the collections I liked the most was one of Prada’s most bizarre: fall 2009, remembered for the kinky thigh-high fishing rubber waders worn with high-waisted briefs in sturdy tweed. It was a dark, moody, despondent collection, both irritating and irresistible. Tailoring was stellar, austere, mannish, sexy—round opera collars mounted on sloping-shouldered coats and blazers, a cinched waist, and slit skirts revealing nude legs. Thick boiled wools in somber colors; Mohawk patent-leather studded heels; slightly spooky red-rimmed eyes; cloud-like, crinkled-up hairdos—as if Kenneth on high had made Deeda Blair’s bouffant a frizzy mess. It was Miuccia at her most fabulously odd—my credit card still weeps thinking about that collection.
Laird Borrelli-Persson, Senior Archive Editor
There are so many types of women playing the heroine in Prada’s fall 2002 ready-to-wear collection. Puff sleeves mark the debutant, spangles the circus performer; there’s satin lingerie for the coquette, goddess pleats and chainmail for the latter-day flapper. These are clothes that make you dream not only about how to look, but how to be.
Laia Garcia-Furtado, Senior Fashion Editor
In my memory of events, seeing the photos of Prada’s fall 2008 collection, aka “the one about lace,” immediately and completely changed my view of the world. But recently I found something that I had written at the time and it turns out that I deeply disliked it. While I cannot figure out how I could be turned off by a collection that I became completely obsessed with to the point of amnesia a few months after is perhaps testament to the power of Mrs. Prada’s abilities to play with our expectations. To me there was a complete submission to sensuality with the lace while also exerting total control. This look specifically, with the blue button down shirt visible through all the layers, and then its various components—skirt, halter, peplum— which are also clues to the ritual of getting dressed, piece by piece, to still remain a little naked after you’re finished, remains to me the sexiest look ever.
José Criales Unzueta, Fashion Writer
I consider the Prada fall 2008 and spring 2009 men’s collections two crucial ones in the history of menswear. There’s a perversity to the way Mrs. Prada broke down the sartorial codes of masculinity for fall ’08, and a tenderness to the same approach for spring ’09. Still, the result is indiscriminately Prada: clothes that are familiar yet somehow incredibly strange. They are alluring but make you a little uncomfortable. They’re hard to make out until you sit with them for a while. It’s a tall order to make something like the suit or a button-down shirt feel new, yet here every look is a surprise. Come for the great tailoring and stay for the kinky clerical collars, open back shirts, and bikini-esque overlays.
