The Prada Spring/Summer 2024 collection proposes an absolute freedom of the body expressed in lightweight dresses in floaty fabrics that challenge the language of classic tailoring. Formal silhouettes, borrowed from menswear, are reimagined in architectural forms that reconsider the archetypal contours of formal rigor. Made in Prada’s iconic materials, bags and shoes are embellished by the use of precious leathers.
The collection reproduces and reinterprets a handbag design originally devised by Mario Prada, Miuccia Prada’s grandfather and co-founder of Prada, in the 1913. Originally proposed in silk moiré, the style is recreated in Nappa leather and re-nylon featuring a hand-carved fastening depicting a mythological figure.
A traveler with a deep intellectual curiosity and interest in culture, Mario Prada would journey around the globe to source precious artifacts that, upon return, were assembled into unique luxury items.
“Design duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons outdid themselves with their wonderfully weird spring 2024 women’s collection, which included some of the most gorgeous dresses to come down a runway in a while — shifts in pale blue, green, or pink silk gazar trailing layers of superfine organza like vapor behind them. […] And so the brand continues to be inventive today, always giving us something just beyond our grasp, in this case a gooey delight”.
WWD
“The collection offered a splintered vision, not only past, present and future but also stark juxtapositions of hard and soft, masculine and feminine, light and dark, work and play. […] But the toughness of the collection was also striking: sturdy worn barn jackets, patchworked black leather coats and dresses, broad-shouldered shirt jackets and tightly belted waists over rah-rah shorts. Pure film noir. In fact, the whole thing was extravagantly, evocatively cinematic in a way that Prada hasn’t been for a long while”.
BOF
“It’s not that a designer needs to reject history (theirs, ours, a brand’s) entirely — if you don’t learn from it, you are doomed to repeat it and yadda, yadda, yadda. But it needs to be remixed rather than reproduced, so that suddenly the familiar looks entirely different. That’s how progress happens. That’s what Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons do so brilliantly at Prada, and what they did again this season”.
NY Times
“All to be wrinkled, grasped, consumed, in the pink metal set, of dripping slime. A subtle perversion, after all, has always electrified Prada’s codes, and this is a very Prada collection, all made up of conjunctions of the masculine and the feminine, of girly flappers and schoolteacher cardigans, embroidery, and chunky belts, flowing dresses and neon shoes. […] The fashion show is an updated summary of Prada’s best”.
Il Sole 24 Ore
“What hasn’t changed is Prada’s ability to stage a talking-point show. […] But the raison d’etre, as always with Prada, was the clothes. On the one hand there was the light-as-a feather femininity with, at times, an almost flapper-girl edge. The contrasting masculine tropes ranged from the on duty (retooled grey and-black suiting, the blazer tucked into trousers or tailored shorts) to the off-duty (an outsize patchwork blouson jacket or leather-collared wax jacket). Not that Prada kept these two modes separate. Its aesthetic has long been about the juxtaposition of supposed wrongs into a whole new “right”.
The Times