Just a couple of weeks ago insiders who worked on the presidential campaign stated that US President Donald Trump prefers female staffers "to dress like women". Soon after the statement, people took to the social media and started celebrating influential women and posting their own interpretations of this statement.
Yet, while we were posting tweets, Miuccia Prada must have been thinking and scheming about her A/W 2017 runway.
Her personal interpretation of what it feels like to be a woman nowadays was indeed the very essence of the show that took place yesterday's afternoon during Milan Fashion Week.
The space in Via Fogazzaro was more or less the same domestic backdrop for the A/W 17 men's show with the benches and beds with leather sheets separated by partitions covered in tiles, formica or marble.
There were some additions, that is walls covered with posters, photographs, postcards, maps and clippings, materials that were meant to help the guests identifying the people inhabiting this continuous space designed by Rem Koolhaas's AMO – women and feminists.
Miuccia had firmly in mind Fellini's City of Women, yet the collection was not about the film per se, but about the title, the idea of women's power in a male world gone utterly wrong.
This idea first materialised as corduroy pants matched with thick wool bras and duffel coats, then it developed in embellishments, ostrich feathers, and embroideries on pencil skirts, fluffy mohair cardigans, beaded skirts and tweed jackets, and in the crystals covering dresses for modern flappers.
Some of the knitwear motifs seen on the jumpers from the men's collection were applied to jackets and skirts. The furry shoes from that collection were transformed into multicoloured boots, while the shell and wood necklaces and the Roberta di Camerino evoking bags seen on the men's/pre-Fall runway made a come back.
There was also something else: illustrations by Robert McGinnis (also known for his film posters for Breakfast at Tiffany's, James Bond movies, Barbarella and The Incredibles) for '60s pulp thrillers, such as Brett Halliday's Murder and the Married Virgin and Never Kill a Client or Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Half-Wakened Wife, were printed on sheaths and pencil skirts.
Miuccia is considered a master in subversion and she employed the pulp illustrations that usually exploited female sexuality as ways to hint at powerful women, femmes fatales with guns or ingenues turned sinister vixens with weapons of mass seductions.
In a way it was as if the idealism of left-wing Italian politics in the '70s was filtered through glamorous lenses and pulp atmospheres.
Though, at times, rather than seeing Miuccia Prada's youth fascination with protest and politics as a young woman, you could almost see in the corduroy flares and hand-knitted scarves in mismatched colours Monica Vitti in La Pacifista.
But Prada's also pulp pin ups called to mind Monica Vitti turning from a girl trapped in conventions to seductress and independent woman in The Girl with the Pistol.
Maybe the character was on Miuccia's mind: backstage, while explaining ideas and inspiration, Prada referenced a feminist at the women's march holding a placard on which she expressed her disappointment at having to fight about the same issues and rights 50 years later than she originally did.
It is highly unlikely that Prada will lead the revolution, but the vision of sensual vixens with a gun in their hand could be conceived as an answer to the arrogance of male power, a way to tell the world that there's more to a girl than sugar and spice and all things nice.
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