While some fashion houses in Milan opted for real-life shows, others are still presenting their new collections via lookbooks and films, continuing to toe to the Coronavirus regulations that we have followed for more than a year now.
Prada is among the latter and showed its S/S 22 menswear collection with a film (that some journalists and critics actually watched live at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, an event followed by a preview of the actual clothes that you can explore in a 360° digital format here).
There was a sense of doom followed by hope in the film: models walked along a claustrophobic red tunnel (installed in a warehouse at the Fondazione Prada in Milan), but they emerged on a rocky and beautiful beach in Sardinia (where Prada supports the MEDSEA Foundation in its project to restore marine ecosystems with the reforestation of Posidonia oceanica meadows in the Marine Protected Area of Capo Carbonara).
Here some of the models walked along the beach, others danced or sat on red platforms floating on the sea or immersed themselves in crystalline waters.
The metaphor wasn't hard to understand: because of the pandemic we have all been navigating through a terrible year, but there is light at the end of the tunnel as proved by this simple transition from the inside to the outside, we all feel a need for the simple joys of everyday life, for reconnecting with the natural elements that we have missed.
Maybe there was also a need for Prada to do something the house had never done before, that is letting its models roam in an open space, abandoning the highly conceptual spaces created season after season for its runways, and in doing so abandoning more technological inspirations to reconnect with the essence of human life.
Clothes and accessories also pointed at the possibility of wandering in open spaces: we may have abandoned the tracksuits that marked the long lockdown months, but we are not in the mood to wear any proper suits yet, so Miuccia Prada and co-designer Raf Simons are suggesting us another option – the short jumpsuit with turned-up short hems, or to be more precise the short version of the tuta (overalls) by Italian painter and sculptor Ernesto Michahelles, better known as Thayaht. Prada has actually been a consistent Thayaht fan throughout the seasons.
The geometrical patterns of the skorts (a combination of shorts and skirt) also pointed at the patterns of Thayaht's "ancali" (hip-shorts) and the tank-tops evoked his "toraco" (a thorax vest). The squared necklines of the tanks matched with relaxed pants, also had a late 1920s mood, in the same way as the squarish shapes of the sandals in this collection pointed at designs created by Thayaht for the Summer of 1929.
Bizarrelly, also the shapes of the bucket hats with an elongated brim at the back with a triangular logo pocket or with slits in the front to allocate sunglasses, seemed to echo the shapes of the hats for Thayaht's 1928 straw hat campaign.
The collection also bore elements of previous Prada collections such as the nautical tattoo-like prints of octopuses, sea monsters, anchors and sirens, reminiscent of Prada's A/W 2016 with further nautical moods injected in a boat-neck sweater with crisscross detail and in an updated version of a classic yellow fisherman's raincoat (evoked also by a yolk-yellow biker jacket) with a matching hat.
Some of the other prints may have come from a Prada collection from around 1996, while the emphasis on shorts was more recent (see the S/S 19 collection) and the thick terry hoodies and bucket bags in cracked leather evoked vintage moods lost between the end of the '60s and the early '70s.
So, in a way that re-emergence into the open air was also a return to the past, almost a quest for a lost innocence on the beach that at times trapped Prada's models in a suspended grey area between boyhood and manhood.
Some elements in the looks of the models showed indeed a desire to be back in the office, possibly in powerful positions, but the rompers matched with derby shoes sprouting surreal sea anemones seemed to pigeonhole the models into childhood.
Apart from being trapped into this suspended world, the models also looked a bit lifeless despite the key sentences accompanying the collection – "tunnel to joy", "urgency of feelings" and "utopia of normality" – pointed at a rebirth of happiness. You wish that at least one model had left behind the classic conceptual miserabilism that belongs to the runway and smiled to express that sense of ebullient joy at being on a beautiful beach in a post-pandemic world.
Sadly, that didn't happen and, unfortunately, there was no recorded chat between co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons (the norm for the last few seasons) that may have shed some light on Simons' role, as at the moment he seems to have been in awe of the Prada archive and too busy pillaging it. Yet the beach and the crystalline waters of Capo Carbonara looked paradisiacal, that's undeniable, can we have more of that and forget fashion?
Rispondi