Prada Spring/Summer 2016: Italy’s First Lady Of Fashion Shows The Rest Of The World How It’s Done

Miuccia Prada was absent from her Milan show this evening due to a family bereavement but there was no question about her magnificent presence informing every last detail of the collection.

In a season where vintage references have been ubiquitous, this extraordinary designer showed the rest of the world how, with great wit, understanding and refinement, that might best be done. If all too many of her contemporaries resort to pastiche – even cleverly beautiful pastiche – she understands the cultural context of each and every decade and how to reinvent that to entirely modern and, it almost goes without saying, hugely desirable effect.

The show started out dour. Corrugated plastic cylinders and rectangles edged with battered metal and suspended from an inky black ceiling and a concrete floor were the industrial backdrop to leather skirt suits in sludgy colours. The jackets were full with a wide dropped half belt from behind, the skirts straight. So far, so frumpy. But disco ball earrings, patent leather shoes in candy colours finished with silver pom poms and gleaming brass ankle straps, not to mention models' burnished gold lips, were a sign of more dressed up things to come.

The Prada woman's idea of glamour is far from conventional, however. She may – like the woman who dreams her up - love embellishment and even frivolity but the way she puts that together is powerfully inventive, subversive even. And so, sheer organdy dresses were worn over tweedy skirts in murky shades. More tweed was overlaid with a messy cobweb of oversized paillettes that looked like their wearer might have made them herself before going out on the tiles. It's safe to say that few of us are actually gifted enough to have done so.

As the show progressed the woman at the centre of this story became increasingly abandoned – drunk on the glitz of it all, perhaps - in oversized, Twenties-line silk dresses with a dropped waist printed with stripes in Courreges colours, in chiffon separates over big knickers and chunky knit tanks in jarring brights and, most especially in a final sequence of sequinned opera coats scattered with flowers. They were nothing short of genius worn over woolly jumpers tucked into striped leather and bronze, gold and silver snakeskin pencil skirts.

It’s not news that the Prada Group is suffering from the economic downturn in Europe and Asia but if anyone can turn that around then it is surely the creative powerhouse behind this fabled Italian name. Pull each look apart and there was an almost spellbinding amount of wonderful clothes to choose from.