Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called their latest menswear collection, shown yesterday afternoon at Milan Fashion Week, ‘an exercise in clarity’. The runway was made from clear Perspex; underneath, row upon row of strip lighting, as if models were striding along an enormous light box, like those used by photographers to spot imperfections in their negatives.
Prior to the show, the designers said that they were putting menswear’s fundamental garments under their own scrutiny: most notably, the denim jean, a piece of clothing so ubiquitous that it is still being worn despite Milan’s close-to-40-degree heat. Others were the T-shirt (also ubiquitous, including being worn by Mrs Prada herself, underneath a duster coat), the denim jacket, the blazer and the leather blouson. They called them ‘striking in their pragmatism… a framework for ceaseless possibility and reinterpretation.’
Prada S/S 2027 men’s: ‘It’s against useless design’
Such interrogations have been at the heart of the pair’s collaboration, which is now in its 13th season (Simons joined Mrs Prada as co-creative director in 2020). Largely eschewing the stricter themes which once defined a Prada collection, they prefer to work through intuition. ‘We worked instinctively, we know what we don’t want to do, and we know that we have to refresh, go forward, do many things,’ they said in a joint statement. ‘But with a lot of knowledge of fashion. Everything looks simple, but it is not.’
The show was opened by Australian model and longtime Prada muse Julia Nobis (a handful of women walked the show this season, a reflection of the unisex nature of the collection), who wore a matching cream pair of jeans and a denim jacket, with a navy blazer on top. Prior to the show, Simons likened this mix of sartorial ingredients to a ‘pasta pomodoro’ – a dish of ultimate simplicity (he wore a version for his runway bow).
From there, the look was reworked: ‘jeans’ came in brightly hued leather, wool, or a sheer material that revealed the garment’s construction beneath, blazers in Prince of Wales check or pinstripe. The look was skinny throughout – the designers described it as a ‘highly controlled silhouette’ – while accessories largely centred around the waist, from super-wide belts that were hung with nylon and leather pouches, to patterned foulard-style silk scarves, tied around the midriff.
‘The ambition was to do something new with nothing – against exaggeration, against complex material. Against useless design,’ the pair said. ‘There is nothing that [we] hate more in this period than useless design – this collection expresses this concept. And this nothingness is very precise – to do this is far more difficult to achieve.’
Follow our live coverage of Milan Fashion Week Men’s here.
