Prada Autumn Winter 2015 Show Report: All Dressed Up

In place of the vast open landscape set that has come to be expected of Italy’s most influential designer, guests filed through a series of interconnecting, salon-style spaces coloured blush pink, mint green, apricot and primrose to take their seats at the Prada show in Milan this evening. If the intimacy of the mise en scene spoke of times gone by, this was offset by perforated silver metal panels suspended from the ceiling and more – perfectly square, oval, circular – placed on the floor that were thoroughly modern in flavour.

The clothes were a similarly effortless fusion of the timelessly elegant and the innovative and contemporary that this designer is known for. Tailoring in what looked like haute scuba fabric – it was, in fact, a technical double-faced jersey - was neat and cut close to the body: a buttoned up jacket with pointed lapels was worn with trousers, cropped at the ankle, that kicked from the knee. Coats in herringbone tweed were similarly demure. They were of the sort a young Princess Elizabeth II once famously wore.

References to mid-Twentieth Century French couture came thick and fast also: think swing backs and balloon skirts and dresses, stiffened with underpinnings in black tulle.

If much of the above would not have seemed out of place at a debutantes ball – or cocktail party at least – the look was endlessly twisted in the way only Miuccia Prada knows how.

The colour palette was joyfully jarring: teal green, chartreuse, raspberry and plum; grey, camel, poppy red and flame. Pick an unlikely – and even willfully perverse – juxtaposition and it was all present and correct. Equally skewed was fabrication – that spongy weave – and ornamentation: rectangular strips of fur (brown) where epaulettes might be, jewelled flowers scattered unevenly across the surfaces of clothing and larger, stranger blooms crafted in plastic. Even models up-dos were pulled cutely to one side.

As for the footwear… Leather sock boots with chunky rubber soles in surgical pinks were so studiously awkward they doubtless made even the woman who designed them proud.

There were many of Miuccia Prada’s favourite things in this lovely and upbeat show: those shoes, colours and tweeds, ostrich leather and an abstracted ostrich leather print, references to film noir and Hollywood glamour and the deliberate and disorienting mash up of the rarefied and the humble. Nonetheless – and this is where her talent truly shines – the overall effect was fresh and new.

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