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“A requiem for America?” messaged an (American) friend halfway through. Well maybe, maybe not. Or at least this wasn’t explicitly that: for when it was suggested that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons might have been thinking about this show’s timing on the eve of the inauguration, Prada demurred. And yet earlier she had offered: “It is a bit of an answer, as always, to what is happening. So we have to resist with our instinct, and our humanity, and our passion, and our hands in a world that is becoming so conservative.” Implicitly that opening interpretation—and many others—were all valid takeaways from a show that overflowed with interesting clothes and potential metaphors.
Take the set. It was a huge, three-story warren of scaffold: open but also claustrophobically supported by its bristling metal superstructure. The models began their walk on the top floor, moving through unwalled rooms and down staircases with Catherine Martin-designed, Art Nouveau-style pattern carpet down to the bottom floor. With all of us clustered so closely in it, the structure seemed a little shaky, even borderline fragile, if blessedly not quite at the point of collapse. “You could think club, work in progress, construction, architecture,” mused Simons.
The music, too, seemed consciously ad hoc, a restless search through different stations. Emotive snippets of Rossini, Nyman, and Puccini bordered jagged sections of electronica. “Technology, technology, technology,” mantra-ed a soothing female voice before the models started walking.
The collection was like the soundtrack: an unconventional minestrone of ingredients drawn from across different genres to create a mix as radical as it was unlikely. “We do not want to limit ourselves,” said Simons. Pieces and patterns, (some previously seen at Prada, others not) were corralled and collapsed into single looks whose most regular foundations were cowboy boots with scuffed toes. Pajama pants in traditional plain or striped piped cotton, or ’70s-floral bed sheet prints, played against coats and shirts in queasily-colored plaids, house-cut suiting, crumpled silk-satin pants in poppy colors, crewneck knits with Western wear tooling details, high-shine down jackets and gilets, ivory silk evening wear, toughly patched leather suiting, and traditionally gentleman-ish outerwear that was as often as not collared in roughly cut shearling pelts. Models wore enamel or metal basketballs and baseballs as necklaces and earrings, or as chained amulets that hung like totems from knitwear.
Those pelts were also sometimes worn as vests, rawly themselves or layered over knits, or used to edge detachable collars covered in more naive 70s floral during an outerwear section near the end. Prada man was breaking down then putting on multiple looks in the lexicon—from caveman to cowboy to businessman and more—all at once, apparently with scant regard for the conventions of context, image, or intention. It was curated chaos deployed to declare new disorder.
Within all this shifting menswear weather, however, the silhouette remained relatively consistent. It was rooted into place by those heeled boots and the general against-the-wind skinniness of the pant shape. Said Simons: “We come to a point where we say, ‘that feels right.’ If we try to not really dictate something or make a theory, it’s more ‘that feels right.’ As much as certain things are very loose and open and coming from many different points, that one is something that is very repetitive. A non-system, almost.” The raw and the cooked, served up on the same Prada plate.
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