The Business Of Fashion – 26 septembre 2016<\/p>\n
At Prada, Memories Are Made of This<\/p>\n
Miuccia Prada’s new collection plumbs the past to reassure the future.<\/p>\n
BY TIM BLANKS<\/p>\n
MILAN, Italy \u2014 I can\u2019t remember a time when Miuccia Prada looked so happy at the end of a show. Instead of her usual tentative nod from the wings, she walked down the catwalk to acknowledge David O. Russell, many times Oscar-nominated director and the man responsible for the film that played on multiple screens throughout the Prada presentation.<\/p>\n
The subject of Russell\u2019s film was the mutability of time. No surprise that Miuccia was feeling the same idea. Her new collection skated across Prada\u2019s back pages with an ease so straightforward you could imagine that it would be charming if this was your introduction to the brand.<\/p>\n
The same idea was at work with the men\u2019s show in June. Memories. Reassurance. Brand icons. There, it was a revisit of the black nylon backpack on which the company\u2019s fortunes were rebuilt in the 1980s. The collection had a rave-y, idealistic, community-of-travellers\u2019 edge. Here, the dominant visual motif was a variant on the very particular graphic prints with which Prada flayed its mark on fashion in the mid-90s, when revenues soared as the label became the industry\u2019s go-to for new.<\/p>\n
But those days are gone. Prada is wrestling with reality (with the redundancy that seems to inevitably attach itself to mature businesses, unless you\u2019re prepared to make a 180 degree flip like Gucci). Getting back to that notion of introduction, it made commercial sense to return to the heyday. But what was it that virgin eyes would actually have seen in this collection?<\/p>\n
First thing: marabou. You could imagine a newbie wondering how and why the hell all those feathers were everywhere? A seasoned observer might conjecture that they were one of those things Miuccia had always hated, the thing she felt compelled to include to confront her loathing (suede is the most famous example). Not at all. She thought marabou was \u201cthe most silly thing\u201d. Which sounded like the consummate back-handed compliment, by the way, because there\u2019s something in Miuccia that wants to nail emblems of ultra-femininity to the wall alongside tokens of feminism.<\/p>\n
So her marabou trimmed the business-y camel wrap top that accompanied the black wrap skirt of a model clutching a big, business-y clutch. Well, sort of business-y. The collection clarified how perverse Mrs P has always been in her various definitions of the way a woman can be. \u201cA new way of elegance\u201d were the words she used to nail this particular offering.<\/p>\n
It was plain that her new elegance involved maximum mobility, a get-up-and-and-go physicality that could turn on a dime when breaking news intruded on your own patch. Short shorts, tank tops, jumpsuits, skirts slit for movement, everything calibrated for rapid response\u2026 but rimmed with marabou, and accessorised with sandals. A kind of best-of-both-worlds modernity\u2026 fact and fantasy.<\/p>\n
There was an entirely brainiac postscript to this whole affair. Inevitably, it pertained to the soundtrack by longtime Prada collaborator Frederic Sanchez. The nu-Satie piano stylings of Alex Menzies mixed with Donna Summer\u2019s MacArthur Park and Diana Ross\u2019s Love Hangover. Sanchez called it an existentialist mash-up, here, the melancholic recognition of a world in flux, there, the sheer, wonderful denial of disco bliss. The world’s a darkening place. Thank fashion for shining its own light. In fact, thank it twice.\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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