Prada’s co-creative directors are hardly poster children for jeans: Miuccia Prada says she’s never worn them — and probably never will — while Raf Simons has favored wool trousers for the last 20 years or so.
But on Sunday afternoon, ahead of their spring men’s show, Simons was sporting white jeans, glowing bright from the fluorescent tubes lined up under the vast, transparent runway set, where he and Prada held a press briefing.
Under her flaring, buttonless beige satin coat, Prada wore a T-shirt, another recurring element in their distilled, and very intentional, wardrobe for spring.
They had settled on jeans as the foundation of the collection out of a wish to create something interesting with the most universal of garments. “And historical, because it doesn’t come from fashion either,” Prada noted about jeans, worn by sailors and workers for centuries.
The Austrian-Czech architect Adolf Loos — who famously characterized ornamentation as crime — came to mind as Prada denounced “useless design” and Simons drew an analogy to “pasta pomodoro” in using only the most basic fashion ingredients: jeans, a jean jacket, a T-shirt, a blazer and a leather blouson.
“We very, very, very much are rejecting complication and decoration,” Simons declared. “We wanted to create an attitude with garments that people always want to wear by rethinking how these garments can be new.”
Not since the heyday of Hedi Slimane at Dior have we seen such dramatically shrunken silhouettes, which gave the show a youthful zing and occasionally a rock ‘n’ roll edge, especially when looks hinged on leather.
But Prada and Simons also injected plenty of Prada quirks, including retro curtain patterns on snug sweater vests and skinny jeans; offbeat colors like anise green and Pepto-Bismol pink, and wonky, asymmetrical eyewear with a futuristic glean.
“Rematerialized, rescaled or their use is reversed” is how Simons summed up their approach, cutting jean jackets like fitted shirts, for example, or making newfangled suits of the so-called “Canadian tuxedo” by using suiting fabrics or translucent white nylon, and never blue denim.
Julia Nobis opened the show in a cream jean jackets, cream jeans and a navy blazer, and several other female models walked the show, sending the additional message that such garments truly have no gender.
Such garments are also not the most exciting ones to watch in a fashion show, but that seemed to be part of the point.
“We think this collection is breaking the perception of what is perceived as typical luxury in high fashion,” Simons said. “People can be individuals with common garments if you rethink how to wear them, how to combine them.”
“Fashion is what you think is right to wear in that moment,” Prada piped in.
And while the collection looked simple, “it was much more difficult and complicated than doing an embroidered evening dress,” Prada said, citing the use of technical materials, heat sealing and various printing techniques.
With its contrarian propositions — light on the tailoring, embellishment and neckwear seen elsewhere in Milan — this show, using Simons’ “pasta pomodoro” analogy, offered plenty of food for thought.
