‘A skirt is like a T-shirt,’ Miuccia Prada told Ingrid Sischy on the Charlie Rose show in 2006. The interview coincided with ‘Waist Down – Skirts by Miuccia Prada’ exhibition, which was running at the New York Prada Epicenter store at the time, a display of the designer’s skirts from 1988 to the present – from those adorned with red lips or swathes of crystals and beads, to versions in chiffon, leather and mohair.
Which is to say that the skirt has always been something of a canvas for Mrs Prada, who largely wears the garment herself and has continued to experiment with the style in her recent collections (now, she does so alongside Raf Simons, her co-creative director since 2020). She will occasionally wear trousers, but never jeans – she admitted after her S/S 2027 menswear show that she had never worn a pair in her life, even as a teenager.
She mentioned this because jeans were the starting point of that menswear collection, which the designers described as ‘an exercise in clarity’ (Mrs Prada has often said that a collection will begin with something she ‘hates’). Versions came in brightly-hued leather, tailoring wool or a sheer fabric which revealed the jean’s workings beneath; other ‘ingredients’ of the collection were ‘the denim jacket, the blazer, the leather blouson and the T-shirt.’
Simons said that the idea for that collection was for ‘everything to [be] simple, but it is not,’ likening the process to creating a ‘pasta al pomodoro’ – a staple of Italian cuisine made from just the simplest of ingredients. ‘There was something compelling about reiteration, about this focus,’ the designers said at the time. ‘It is about being extremely decisive and precise.’
This afternoon’s womenswear show, held amid the same OMA-designed showset at Fondazione Prada as the men’s show (the perspex floor and strip lighting give the effect of standing on a lightbox, or photocopier), hinged on a similar conceit. This time, it was the skirt that was under scrutiny: ‘we used the skirt as a framework,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘Like a raw material to express concepts.’
And there were a multitude of ideas here. Skirts came in jewellery-like webs of crystal, evoking lace. Others fastened with embellished Velcro, meaning they could be worn in different ways. They came in cotton, with the illusion of leather, or were wrapped in a layer of tulle, as if their bows and pleats were being preserved in a museum. Others still split down their seams to reveal layers of polka dots or flowers beneath, or were constructed from strange, translucent nylon in various Prada-esque hues.
Mrs Prada called it the ‘most flexible’ garment, to her representing a feeling of sartorial freedom (‘people can wear it however they want’), while Simons said that the skirt appeals to different types of women, and their different moods. ‘You want to be sexy, you want to be luxurious, you want to go to work, you want to be at ease with your kids,’ he said. ‘There are all kinds of skirts [for that].’
The skirt also allowed for what Simons called the collection’s ‘illogical’ combinations – a corporate shirt worn with an expansive pleated skirt (some had to be held in the hands, as one might navigate a ballgown); satin bra tops with a clean-lined Velcro skirt; or a vivid floral skirt, slit to the hip, with a nylon raincoat. ‘[Skirts] are full of contrasting contradictions in their ideas,’ he continued. ‘[This collection] is a process of questioning, reconsidering, rethinking.’
Asked why the skirt had stuck with Mrs Prada so long, she answered, ‘It's theoretical, it's conceptual, it's a frame.’ ‘It’s a contradiction,’ she concluded – that most Prada of concepts.
