‘A new elegance’ is how Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their S/S 2026 Prada womenswear collection, seeking to liberate clothing from its ‘hierarchies’ by shuffling up everyday uniforms – a longtime touch point for the house – with opulent eveningwear, often in the same look.
‘This collection is about reacting to the uncertain – clothes that can shift, change, adapt,’ said Miuccia Prada after the show, held in the sparse Deposito showspace at Fondazione Prada this past October in Milan, the floor flooded with orange-hued lacquer.
Wallpaper Design Awards: these Prada sunglasses are our ‘Best Sartorial Shapeshifter’
A look from Prada’s S/S 2026 womenswear show
A series of clever accessories captured this hybrid, shapeshifting mood, from simple drawstring pouches – like those used to store shoes – rendered in lustrous colourful satin, or kitten-heeled pumps mashed up with the simple elastic plimsolls once worn in PE classes. Though perhaps most striking – and a worthy Wallpaper* Design Award winner – are these glasses, whereby uniform-issue metal-framed opticals are adorned with a surreal bejewelled flourish on their temple tips. As such, they are eyewear and jewellery in one.
‘We started from a sense of freedom,’ says Simons of the collection. ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose. [But] there is also a physical liberation, moving away from fashion as a sculptural imposition on the body of a woman. We shifted into the opposite – physical emancipation, but also freedom as a state of mind… Uniform is part of a Prada history – for us, there is the idea that a woman can be beautiful, elegant and strong in a uniform. It is a challenge, to a hierarchy of perception. To free women from this.’
READ: In Milan, Prada seeks freedom as a ‘response to the overload of contemporary culture’
Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today