Dressing for pleasure: why this season is all about a ‘raw glamour’

An interrogation of femininity has been a part of the Prada project since Miuccia Prada took over the family label in 1978. Her collections have taken the trappings of womanhood and skewed them – handbags and high-heeled shoes, brooches and beehives – each loaded with symbolism and, in her hands, ripe for reinvention. It’s been the same with archetypes, too: flapper girls and businesswomen, nurses, brides and Cinecittà sirens, the fastidiously dressed women of the Italian bourgeoisie – all have received the Prada treatment, which is at once intellectual and impulsive. She has spoken of her love of clichés – in these well-worn tropes, Mrs Prada has long seen only possibility: to make the ugly beautiful, and the beautiful ugly, that most Prada of gestures.

‘Raw Glamour’ was the title given by Mrs Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons to their A/W 2025 collection for Prada, presented in February amid an imposing multi-level scaffold structure erected by OMA in Fondazione Prada’s hangar-like Deposito space in Milan. Here, as models traversed the maze-like show set at speed – hair dishevelled, faces stripped of make-up – there appeared new urgency to the project.

Dressing for pleasure: A/W 2025’s subversive glamour

‘We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,’ said Mrs Prada, noting that the world was entering ‘a very black moment... a difficult time’. ‘It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper – oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

It led the pair to radically rewrite and recontextualise the tropes of glamour. Much of this was done through proportion – the nipped, ladylike contours of 1960s dresses were sized up so they hung off models’ bodies or torn away at their edges, almost violently. ‘The idea of feminine beauty is often about constricting movement, so we wanted these clothes to be about liberation. Which is about fashion, but it is not just about fashion,’ said Simons. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively,’ added Mrs Prada, who envisioned ‘fur’ coats that erupted into strange protrusions at the collar (the ‘fur’ was actually dyed shearling); pointed, high-heeled pumps left raw at the seams; queasy floral prints that suggested 1960s curtains and upholstery; and blouses in-set with creases, while bows, charms and buttons served as girlish adornment. The effect was immediate and electrifying; a glamour released from perfection and constriction, a femininity for our times.

Raw glamour could well have been the byline of the A/W25 season. Fur coats, blouses, bullet bras, brooches, crimson-red lips – everywhere was a heady, perfume- scented whiff of feminine glamour, its well-worn motifs ricocheted into the now. Women prowled a simulacrum of a red-walled public toilet at Valentino (in sickly-sweet layers of lace, ruffles and bows, to a soundtrack by Lana Del Rey, herself a master of disruptive feminine glamour); at Acne Studios, leggy Helmut Newton-esque glamazons clashed with the cocooning dress codes of the wilds of northern Sweden (the enormous faux fur coats and boots were inspired by teddy bears); while at Marni, in what was Francesco Risso’s final collection for the house, a heady take on the salon show saw models wander through a hand-drawn imagining of a Milanese café in colourful faux furs, patchwork silk dresses and giant floral corsages. Risso had worked with the Nigerian artists Slawn and Soldier throughout the process of designing the collection in a kind of shared creative studio. ‘It was such an intense and freeing experience,’ says Risso. ‘I wanted the art to pervade everything and for people to feel like they could get drunk on these clothes.’

At Fendi, a collection of irreverent Roman glamour saw ‘fur’ coats constructed from shearling, which was then painstakingly dyed to look like fox, mink or sable. Silvia Venturini Fendi likened it to how her mother and aunts had revolutionised Fendi a generation before by stripping fur coats of their linings or turning them inside out – a provocative act at the time – which spoke to the changing needs of a woman’s wardrobe. ‘They were considered crazy to try and demolish a status symbol,’ she said, noting the nonchalant way in which women treated furs at the time as the ultimate expression of glamour, whether slinging them over the back of a chair or allowing stoles to drag along the floor behind them. ‘It was from them that I learned to appreciate the value of ideas, more than the real economic value of things.’

And at Miu Miu, Mrs Prada’s conundrums continued with a collection she described as ‘an evaluation of the feminine’. For the occasion, the Palais d’Iéna was wrapped in yellow-green moiré, while the collection featured brooches, stoles and bullet bra tops (inspired by the 1950s bombshell, they were sharply pointed at the chest). Meanwhile, a longtime fascination with the Italian bourgeoisie – particularly that of her native Milan – appeared in a mood of dishevelled decadence, from skewiff beehives and crumpled ribbed stockings to mannish overcoats, strangely folded at the chest and slumped along the shoulder line.

‘The typical accessories of femininity: the bra, the brooches, the fur. The question is, what do we retain of femininity? Does it help in this really dangerous moment?’ said Mrs Prada after the show. Her inquisitions were in part rhetorical: she knows that to search for answers for the world’s ills in clothing will always be futile. Instead, this was about a kind of reclamation: she spoke about these elements of glamour becoming ‘bold and powerful’, stripped of cliché but not of appeal.

Here, we present a series of the season’s looks that interrogate such notions of glamour. They are captured on a grand staircase, a location commonly used in film and literature for sweeping entrances and dramatic departures. Is our protagonist descending or ascending? Is she entering the room or leaving it? Is she alone or being watched? And if she is, how will she be seen? In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rebecca (based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier), the narrator’s descent down the staircase at Manderley prefaces a moment of terror: the realisation that she has, unwittingly, dressed in the same gown as Rebecca de Winter, her husband’s late wife and thus a symbol of her own inadequacy. Admonished by her husband, the brooding Maxim de Winter, her face shifts from the pleasure of dressing up to a realisation of how such clothing – here, a corseted white gown adorned with flowers and layers of lace and tulle – is writ with connotations and, when hifted in context, can become a weapon.

Each of these A/W25 looks delight in such contradictions, capturing both glamour’s undeniable seductive appeal – a base desire to dress up, to adorn oneself – as well as its power to disrupt and confront. ‘To me, glamour is not a sexy dress – it’s the opposite,’ elucidated Mrs Prada after the Prada show in Milan. ‘It’s an interior point of view. Glamour is about feeling important.’

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today