Moda Ruvida – Prada doesn’t care, and that’s the whole point

Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons: fashion is just an attitude — a black leather jacket, a yellow square on the back, and nothing left to prove

Fashion is an attitude. When speaking with the news-cycle writers, the two master designers kept returning to the same idea: getting back to essentials. At first it sounds like a stock phrase, something you reach for when you don’t have anything more interesting to say — but then you remember that Mrs. Prada always has a point, and the claim starts working on you, like another well-placed trip wire.

The collection is built on a handful of technical sketches — five, six, eight? Two jackets, a shirt, a knit, a trouser, a pair of shoes as a recurring motif. Within the logic of this collection, those sketches function as sartorial matrices: the same jacket, the same trouser, developed across different fabrics and materials. One silhouette, multiple outcomes — the weight of a cloth responds differently to a cut, a seam twists the edge of a textile in a different direction.

The show and a burning Europe — a fashion system that refuses to change

The show takes place during the hottest hours of the summer solstice, as Europe burns the way it hasn’t since 2003. Here at Prada, as everywhere, the audience divides into two types: those who come to watch the clothes; those who come to be seen wearing them. Also as everywhere, the second group is treated considerably better than the first — the first must walk three hundred meters on foot from the last security checkpoint blocking the neighborhood streets.

Fashion is an attitude. Sending out a small number of looks, worked across different fabrics and materials: rather than focusing on prototypal ambition, it’s more useful to read what Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons have done intellectually.

It doesn’t reduce to the cliché, buying less but better. There is no need here for decoration, no need for four collections a year, no need to be beautiful, or sexy, or anything else — no need to keep producing clothes simply because the fashion system still hasn’t managed to evolve from that critical time in 2020 when it became obvious that it must.

Mrs. Prada, her attitude, her brand’s identity

For Mrs. Prada, that consistency of attitude has built the identity of her brand and laid the foundations of her company. Raf Simons can add his own vision, bring his own graphic instinct — a black leather jacket, a yellow square on the back.

Prada — once again, there’s so little to say, you can only close in a few lines when trying to describe the steady vision, the coherent identity, the attitude — apologize for the repetition — that defines Mrs. Prada.

You just want to ask everyone to leave her alone, to let her keep doing what she’s interested in: her cultural complications, her intellectual speculation, her aesthetic stubbornness. The collaboration with Raf Simons is already enough stimulus to keep Prada a contemporary expression — perhaps the only one — of what can still be called fashion today. Never mind all that digital self-congratulation the other brands must perform; no matter the young ones who repeat the word Prada without knowing what they’re saying, confusing it with another receipt someone else has to pay.

The question, always the same

The question never changes, nor does the effort: how many words does it take to try and explain this coherence of attitude in Mrs. Prada? Maybe it’s impossible to put it into words — even Mrs. Prada couldn’t do it; for her it’s instinctive, and there’s nothing more difficult to rationalize than instinct.

No number of collections will ever be enough to crystallize it — maybe none of them need to be — and yet, that black leather jacket, that yellow square on the back, is a precise statement. In this context, Raf Simons’s graphic language doesn’t tell the story of Raf Simons; it underscores the identity of Mrs. Prada. It sounds like a short circuit – but it’s the opposite. That yellow square works like a different coat of lime applied to the same structure, which sets, and makes the building stronger.

Carlo Mazzoni