A consideration of the meaning of Prada – its codes, its codifications, its language. The Prada May Issue 2024 explores history and heritage: a wider expression of humanity and life through clothes that echo the past, and also a specific consideration of the identity of Prada today. It is multifaceted, paradoxical, ever-changing. An apparent simplicity is complex.
The collection blurs between points of masculine and feminine, day and night, winter and summer, past and future. The contradiction found at a meeting of elegance and sports, a fundamental principle Prada brought to fashion in the 1990s, inspires pieces that reconsider form and function through materialization. A swimming bikini is proposed in glove-suede, a skirt in poplin shirting with ‘cardigan’ shrugged over.
Throughout, there is a sense of classicism. Patterns are archetypal: argyle checks, foulard geometrics, stripes, florals across transparent nylonette. Trench coats, patinated leather biker jackets and men’s tailoring are mixed, wool flannel is a key fabric. Familiar items are readdressed, appropriated and transformed. They are twisted to the language of Prada. Overcoats are painted with foliate patterns, while argyle becomes a print on silks.
There is an inherent eccentricity, outfits composed of many elements – rich in meaning. Paradox can be found in juxtapositions of individual items and of materials, each bearing their own reality. Gloves may be worn with a bathing costume, tied scarves can transform into a dress or top. Instinctive gestures become considered design – always expressive of realities.
Echoes of Prada’s past are found in fabrications: crushed metallic woven textiles, jacquards shifting between cloquet and antique poplin or chiffon and cotton, the hyper-classicism of Shetland wool. Re-Nylon bags suspended from crystal straps, resin worked into wide chains. Archival Prada handbag silhouettes are reproposed in colored Re-Nylon – a bauletto from 2000, the original Prada backpack of 1984, and a top-handle style from 1978 – the year Miuccia Prada took over the company. They are milestones, joined by new designs: the Prada Arqué, the Prada Buckle.
Craft gives another sense of humanity – delicate embroideries, knits and raffia crochet in the form of the emblematic Prada Symbole pattern, they express the power and honor of the hand. The clothes propose gestures of Prada: pins as closures at neck or sleeve, coats clutched with belts, bows tied. Moreover, they are an expression of a joy in dressing, a love of fashion, and of an eccentric elegance that is essentially Prada.