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An Other Mag – 30 Septembre 2015<\/p>\n
Palimpsest: The Absence and Presence of Miuccia Prada<\/p>\n
Jo-Ann Furniss explores the autobiography of Mrs Prada’s newest collection, and how she is the perfect imagineer for the fashion universe<\/p>\n
Photography Federico Ferrari – Text Jo-Ann Furniss<\/p>\n
Miuccia Prada was not present at the showing of her Spring\/Summer 16 womenswear collection in Milan \u2013 and yet her presence could be felt everywhere. It was a Prada collection and show par excellence \u2013 both strangely familiar yet strangely strange. In OMA\u2019s floating set, suspended sheets of curved and corrugated fibre glass and plastic were a ghostly mimic for a rougher, metal, real world version of events. So too were the clothes, where the bourgeois tweed suit became almost a delicate apparition, reworked in transparencies, sometimes intercut with aprons of original, traditional tweed. Then time would almost be literally sliced, in clothing made from strips of fabric in patent leather, fur, or the finest couture fabrics. Were these 20s Art Deco stripes? 60s youthquake signifiers? Signs of the sportswear of now? Or was this simply something of the future built on the many iterations of the past?<\/p>\n
“Miuccia is always looking for the \u2018tipping point\u2019 \u2013 something slightly uncomfortable and unconventional. She has no fear in challenging people\u2019s perceptions of beauty” \u2013 Guido Palau<\/p>\n
What was taking place in fact seemed to be a rushing together of the past, present and future, an almost autobiographical overview from the person of Miuccia Prada \u2013 who was herself both there and not there (a personal emergency meant that she wasn’t physically present at the show). Her long-term collaborator Frederic Sanchez\u2019s auditory accompaniment was composed of ghostly snatches and layers of jazz, which he defined as \u201cA disorientation of time, where your head is full of memories \u2013 fragments of a life.\u201d The stylist of the show, Olivier Rizzo, described \u201cMiuccia\u2019s life as an eccentric clash of culture and knowledge. Where there are so many years of her looking at the world and of her being in the world.\u201d The show\u2019s hairstylist, Guido Palau, created hair that purposely traversed the lines of kiss-curled flapper, skin girl rebel and \u2018baby-fringed\u2019 scally girl, \u201cThere is an idea of tricking the eye \u2013 it could be seen as nostalgic but it isn\u2019t,” he explained. “There is always something else at work, something strange. Miuccia is always looking for the \u2018tipping point\u2019 \u2013 something slightly uncomfortable and unconventional. She has no fear in challenging people\u2019s perceptions of beauty.\u201d For Fabio Zambernardi, Miuccia Prada\u2019s design director, \u201cThere were so many layers of information, but Miuccia ultimately thought it should be beautiful and chic. We simply wanted to do something chic for a Prada woman with experience and knowledge who likes beautiful clothes. That\u2019s why Miuccia became obsessed with suits. Of course she gets bored of suits in a second! But that is why they also became an obsession for her.\u201d<\/p>\n
View Gallery 19 images
\nPrada perfection: Even when it’s wrong, it must be absolutely right
\n\u201c\u2019Who is this woman who wears a suit? Is it too old? Is it wrong?\u2019 Very often she likes to hate things. She hates things so much it suddenly becomes what she likes!\u201d So says Fabio Zambernardi, of Miuccia Prada\u2019s spin on the Socratic Method that is her design process. In the world of Prada, perfection is paramount, but this is a perfection that is not easily won: even wrongness has to be absolutely right.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sensibility, knowledge and knowhow at Prada \u2013 a creative, sensitive and emotional combination \u2013 is like nowhere else,\u201d says Olivier Rizzo. \u201cTo work for somebody so incredible, so legendary and larger than life as Mrs Prada, together with the wonderful Fabio Zambernardi \u2013 it\u2019s like heaven. With the fashion show you are constantly challenged in a good way; every fibre of your being is challenged creatively, emotionally and mentally. You question yourself so much and Miuccia Prada encourages rebellion as a state of mind \u2013 she is constantly questioning and challenging herself, she sets the example. It is her detail, thinking process and freedom that opens up everything, that looks at and creates all the possibilities. Everything has to gel for a show, everything \u2013 and the openness of mind and courage it takes for her thought and word process blows my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
“Miuccia Prada encourages rebellion as a state of mind” \u2013 Olivier Rizzo<\/p>\n
Of course, Miuccia Prada knew every finite detail and process of her latest show and collection \u2013 she was there until its ultimate completion. But perhaps where her spirit was most present was in the rebellious, chic, wrongness of it all \u2013 the sort of wrongness that only Miuccia Prada as a designer can make seem absolutely right, and right now. The figure of Tutankhamen and the 20s Egyptian revival could be found in those coats made of strips of gilded python and delicate suede, as well as in make-up artist Pat McGrath\u2019s gold lips; the ghostly versions of 90s Prada past, made transparent in brown and orange stripes; the fabric veils draped across the models’ chests, original fabrics from the 20s, unique and rare with a finite supply fully utilised for the show; the purposely plodding knits and prints layered underneath and throwing everything off\u2026 \u201cWhen I was eight years old my grandmother decided to make me a sweater and asked me to choose the colours,\u201d says Fabio Zambernardi. \u201cI was very excited, so excited I actually could not choose\u2026 In the end I chose brown and yellow! As a kid Miuccia was also attracted to things that were so horrible and ugly, colours so wrong they become right.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the latest collection such wrongness of colouration was everywhere present, but particularly in the home-style domesticity of the knitted sweaters layered under elegant flapper dresses, or the ornately embroidered suiting of the finale. A touch of childlike domestic glee that could also be found in the key print of the show, again layered under elegant suiting or dresses, yet looking like a child\u2019s bedspread or wallpaper. Here the details are a race car, a rabbit and a rocket \u2013 Miuccia Prada\u2019s eldest son is a race car driver, the rabbit is for luck and the rocket for the future. Such autobiographical signs and symbols of Miuccia Prada can be found everywhere in the collection, as they can be in all of Pradaland \u2013 including one of its newest attractions: Fondazione Prada.<\/p>\n
Prada-art-land: Fondazione Prada
\nOn the outskirts of Milan, towards Linate Airport, lies the Prada Foundation. In a former industrial complex \u2013 a distillery dating back to the 1910s \u2013 Rem Koolhaas\u2019 OMA has designed a home for the Prada Foundation and an art collection as idiosyncratic and personal as the S\/S16 show. While other corporations present a fundamentally idealised, power view of themselves through art acquisitions to the outside world, Prada\u2019s is distinctly different.<\/p>\n
Weird, domestic, warm and witty \u2013 while at the same time displaying impeccable personal taste \u2013 it is perhaps the most revealing corporate art collection in the world; so wrong at projecting power, it\u2019s absolutely right. Full of blind alleys, staircases to nowhere, nooks and crannies, it is almost as if the art is happened upon by accident at times in this diverse complex of buildings, giving the distinct feeling that you are exploring somebody else\u2019s world, with particular clues to who these people actually are. And, quite frankly, they are mad people \u2013 in the best possible way. Less concerned with an ostentatious display of cold, blank power and more with a funfair flair for aesthetics as entertainment, the complex is dominated by a golden tower, only accessible at set times for restricted numbers, called the Haunted House. The Haunted House is home to a Louise Bourgeois installation from 1996 called Cell (Clothes). With traces of the artist\u2019s life through clothing \u2013 from ghostly children\u2019s clothes to elegant, grown-up eveningwear \u2013 it is perhaps the clearest link in spirit to the present Prada collection: an oddly moving, mixed media biography.<\/p>\n
Downstairs, in one of the adjacent gallery buildings, is another clue to the present collection. In David Hockney\u2019s Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head from Thebes (1963) is a figure seemingly wearing a coat from the show: a gold and green striped tunic, not unlike model Molly Bair\u2019s look. In the Prada Foundation it is clearer than ever that Miuccia Prada is one of the great \u2018brand auteurs\u2019 and a \u2018fashion imagineer.\u2019 If any designer is making pop art today \u2013 and at this point it makes far more sense for it to occur in the realm of fashion than fine art \u2013 it could be credited to Miuccia Prada. With her synthesis of high and low, her unashamed embracing of the consumer experience mixed with a little bit of poisonous doubt in the sugar-candy desirability of her clothing, this commercial, self-referential form of pop becomes post-pop, and she is the Disney queen of it.<\/p>\n