Designers once upon a time made seasonal diktats: Short skirts for spring, bold shoulders for fall, and the like. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were after something much truer to life at Prada, depicting the real decisions women make in their closets everyday: “What do I wear with what? What is possible? Can I do it another way?” as Simons put it backstage. To make their point, they cast just 15 models, each of whom wore four layered looks, for a total of 60 exits. Watching it transpire, it took a minute for it to click, but when it did, it felt like not just a novel gesture, but a humane one; reminding us of the potential of a few key pieces, and even more so of our own imaginations.
Take Julia Nobis. In the show’s opening look she wore a long black coat not unlike the shrunken styles Prada and Simons showed at men’s, with a hand-knit scarf wrapped neatly around her neck. When she reemerged, the coat had come off and we saw her chunky zip sweater; on her third spin around the runway we discovered that sweater-less her skirt was actually a dress, and on her fourth we noticed that for foundations she had on a diaphanous shift and modest, almost old-fashioned underthings. On it went, with the likes of Bella Hadid, Liu Wen, and Amanda Murphy cycling through their wardrobe changes.
As with the men’s collection shown in January, many of these clothes were designed to look pre-worn and well-loved, like maybe they were dug out from the back of a closet: shirt cuffs were lightly soiled, hems were frayed or trailing loose thread, the waxy coating on harrington jackets was peeling away, revealing the houndstooth underneath, and the heels on sturdy oxford shoes were pre-scuffed. None of this diminished the appeal; the expansion of the secondhand market has shown that consumers have a high tolerance for imperfections, in some cases they make pieces more desirable.
Prada and Simons’s excavations extended to the house’s own archives, “very consciously,” Simons admitted. In this moment of industry-wide change, it’s not a bad policy. The Pradaologists will delight in looking for the references—a floral print from one season, a particular shade of pink duchesse satin from another. Even the way the models clutched their coats was a Miucciaism, as were the slouchy, flower embroidered socks. For anyone who’s ever stared hopelessly into their closet and thought to themselves, “what would Mrs. Prada do?”—in fashion, at least, that’s a lot of us—here were some answers. “It’s about the freedom to be inspired, to bring different things together that feel contemporary to us, but it’s not necessarily very narratively inspired—not like the story is this and this and this,” said Simons.
Wardrobe solutions is not a term in Prada or Simons’s vocabulary. Rather, the small pleasures in this collection felt like suggestions. Why don’t you tuck your simple poplin shirt into an embellished slip? Why not wear a plain-on-the-outside jacket with crystal embroidery on the inside? Well, why not?
