Let's start the week with my review of Prada's show at Milan Fashion Week taken from a selection of reports I did for Russian magazine Look At Me (with many thanks to editor Julia Vydolob).
Between the late '50s and early '60s, Vogue America published a series of Cadillac and Chevrolet adverts in which models donned designs inspired by cars. One of the Chevrolet ads featured a woman in a bright red design and stated: "Cherchez la femme en la Chevy. Look for the woman in a 1959 Chevrolet – and you'll find a woman in style!"
There were indeed two key themes behind the fashion and car connection in those years, style and technological developments, the same messages at the core of Miuccia Prada's S/S 2012 collection.
The problem was that it was difficult to detect them for many members of the fashion media, engrossed as they were in the dynamic shoe designs while at the same time keeping an eye on the Twitter's feeds hemorrhaging on their portable devices with messages praising the Prada show, its sets and the looks on the runway.
The industrial space of the Fondazione Prada was turned for the occasion into a parking lot complete with foam cars that also served as seats (an idea courtesy of the team of starachitect and Prada collaborator Rem Koolhaas, obviously sitting in the front row) while the looks seemed to emphasise one point: a stylish car is as fascinating as a stylish dress, their perfection stands indeed in their technological innovations and originality.
Felt coats and jackets decorated with appliqued flowers in shades of nude and coral, blue and orange or green and azure and matched with pleated skirts to the knee opened the show. Then a cartoonish print (that somehow echoed the prints of dancing couples and people surfing and playing golf used for the S/S 12 menswear collection) introduced the car theme.
Cars reappeared then on tube tops (not new at Prada), skirts and dresses, in prints or as appliqued motifs on dark green or brown leather pencil skirts.
When cars didn't appear Miuccia used metonymy to evoke the automotive theme with exhaust flames printed on the hem of a dress or applied to the basic Jean Mazabras for Charles Jourdan/Seducta heel (US Patent D262329 - Download USD262329), turbo pipes sticking out of high heeled shoes (think Boccioni's dynamism-meets-Roy Lichtenstein's "Whaam!" and you get an idea...) and the light pink, yellow and pale blue shades of a Cadillac used as the main palette for a dress.
Yet the very Italian "donne e motori" (women and cars) theme, a rather sexist phrase, always implied another theme, the somewhat erotic relationship between the female body and a machine and Miuccia infused a sort of controlled and lady-like eroticism in her swimsuits in '50s silhouettes and in broderie anglaise dresses and coats in pale nuances, reintroducing a sort of hard edge in the satin jackets with rhinestone motifs.
In a season during which many designers opted for Great Gatsby moods or took their inspirations from the roaring '20s echoing in their collection the aerodynamic concepts of motion and speed derived from Art Deco and Streamlined Moderne, it is easily understandable why Prada's S/S 12 collection was dubbed as innovatively fresh by many critics.
And it may as well be, but, remember, Miuccia is not the first: in 1959 a group of designers - among them also Hartnell, Fabiani and Simonetta - did a collection of Chevrolet inspired creations and there is an entire UK Vogue issue (1 November 1963) dedicated to fashion and cars and to the styles that “a woman with a car in her life” could wear (very aptly introduced via eight iconic cars from books by James Agee, Edward Salisbury Field, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, John Stenbeck, John O'Hara and Vladimir Nabokov).
"I adore cars," Françoise Sagan stated in an article in that same issue of Vogue. Like her Miuccia may be adoring the automotive theme, but, in the history of fashion, she's definitely not the only one who has done so in a stylish and desirable way.
PS Thank you, Miuccia, for this collection, it's a pleasure to know that my already successful car toy necklace will be even more fashionable next year.
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