An instinctive attraction to history. The Fall/Winter 2024 Prada collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons embeds fashion with fragments of histories, in an exploration of notions of beauty, of a contemporary world formed by memories. There is a romance, with the past.
A knowledge of history not only informs the contemporaneous, but defines it – clothes are referent to different eras, other times, synchronous echoes recontextualized. The past is an instrument, a tool for learning, used here to try to invent something new. Yet rather than an intellectual examination, this collection is an emotional reaction, to ideals of beauty that still feel resonant.
Antecedents literally fashion the present. Stereotypical garments of today – biker jackets, bomber jackets, knitwear – are shaped by elements drawn from history, changing line and detail. The concept of fragments is literally reflected through elements embedded within other clothes, and in pieces carved out around the body, peeled away to expose inner layers. Skirts form a façade of fabric, contrasts of delicacy and strength, fragile silk laid against tailoring wool.
The silhouette is narrow, attenuated with an exaggerated verticality. Shoes and hats push proportion to extreme, while clothes embrace the body in a direct expression of the feminine. In turn, gestural qualities of the feminine become inherent: handbags are suspended, sunglasses echo maquillage. Ways of being become structures of making, the intangible traces of human lives made concrete.
Form language can be shifted through materialization, refabrication altering perception. Traditionally masculine materials are reworked into the intrinsically feminine. And clichés of femininity – bows, frills, ruffles – are reconsidered, their meaning fundamentally reassessed. Why do they persist? Why do they attract?
Positing questions, engaging responses, the fashion show is the initiation of a conversation with the world, an exchange of ideas. This instinct, this desire to communicate and express, is a fundamental human impulse – to touch one another, to express feeling, through the clothes we wear.
“The collection was so resonant, so bittersweet, echoing hope and dread equally, keen to endorse love and beauty as universal values, simultaneously aware that love and beauty aren’t enough when the grinding gears of history are reducing human beings to nothing. It was a bold, provocative proposition, and the duo showed clothes to match. Prada and Simons broke history into fragments which they then reconfigured in artful ways.“
BOF
“The stylistic duo gives the audience moments of lucid beauty in dresses and silhouettes, where every reference makes memories flow where they were entangled in years and years of fashion.”
Il Corriere della Sera
“This is why the reaction of Miuccia Prada, who together with Raf Simons has created a collection of surprising delicacy, is so remarkable. The two creatives delved into the past to track down garments and details.”
La Repubblica
“Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, at Prada, are precisely questioning history. What interests her as well as Simons is contextualization, the liberating gesture that resignifies, […] The collection is delightfully sharp yet full of grace.“
Il Sole 24 Ore
“Prada and Simons built that human complexity into their collection, and they did it in modest and tender ways, too. The designers also evoked the glamour of the 1950s, with a series of opera coats and off-the-shoulder cocktail dresses in what looked like black or purple silk taffeta. But when you find out the fabric is technical nylon, the styles escaped their historical cage. The final black coast dress, with a fitted bodice and a high neck, was just superb.”
The Cut