In Glauco Pellegrini's 1956 film Una pelliccia di visone (A Mink Coat) Gabriella and Franco make plans about buying a small flat in the newly developed suburbs of Rome. The plans of the young working class couple seem to be destined to fail, though, when Gabriella wins a luxurious mink fur coat at a lottery and starts getting grand ideas about a future she and her husband can't afford.
This long-forgotten Italian comedy truly tells a lot of about the seductive power that some garments seem to have, but, read from a modern point of view, it also tells a lot about the desires of young Italians in the '50s and the broken and marred dreams of a country in disrupt in the year 2013.
The plot of Pellegrini's film was somehow distantly related to Prada's A/W 2013 collection, showcased in Milan on Thursday afternoon. Mink and sable jackets appeared here and there, but the fur coat that closed the show seemed to cast the very final spell on the critics. Just like the mink coat that enchanted working class Gabriella in Pellegrini's film, it spelled desire and luxury, constrasting with some of the dishevelled looks that anticipated it.
Miuccia Prada borrowed something else from the '50s, the retro silhouettes that appeared throughout the collection - from pencil to full skirts - and the basic cardigans matched with belted off-the-shoulder wool dresses (Maggy Rouff style circa Spring/Summer 1951; obviously seen also on many famous fatal actresses such as Sophia Loren, or Jane Russell in The Outlaw) that at times were decorated with sequined floral motifs.
In her personal search for her bourgeois lady, Miuccia Prada introduced some temporal shifts, combining and colliding together different eras: ample almost oversized sleeves (again Maggy Rouff's '50s designs came to mind, but also the avant-garde sleeve details of early '30s La Tortonese-Merveilleuse's designs), chinchilla cuffs and the golden high-heeled sandals seemed to be borrowed from the set of some kind of '30s-'40s films; the waist cinched full-skirted coats and dresses came as stated from the '50s, while modernity entered via the asymmetric panels added to the hems and the thick rubber sole high-heeled sandals (the golden ones were mixes of Ferragamo and Attilio Ronchi's '40s looks, with some references to the footwear in Robert Siodmack's Phantom Lady) and brogues (the latter called to mind the men's shoes young girls often borrowed from their brothers or young male relatives during the War - something that also appears in Neorealist films).
While echoing the rough austerity of the '40s, fabrics went back to the mid-'50s with some tweedy designs in brown/yellow and black or red and teal vertical stripes and grey flannel dresses (quite often accessorised with large bags). Some of these looks seemed to be entirely lifted from the pages of a 1950-55 issue of Grazia or Annabella, when editorials suggested women to opt for fabrics that wouldn't age with trends.
Glamour moments entered the collection via metallic leathers, while pink and blue gingham designs were the only elements that linked this collection to Prada's A/W 2013 menswear.
Indeed, while Prada's A/W 13 menswear collection marked a return to the simplicity and banality of the wealthy bourgeoisie, here the story seemed to be quite different. There were elements borrowed from the menswear show in the set and setting such as the birds in flight, the cats and a mysterious human figure moving in the shadows, but the catwalk space with its dilapidated mood, bits and pieces abandoned around, shoadows of a rotating fan and a metal grille, channelled Miuccia Prada's interest in cinematic stories of women, a project she has developed further with her Miu Miu line.
Miuccia Prada told the enquirying press the collection was about raw elegance, but there was something else behind those old-fashioned silhouettes that inspired in many a sense of visual déjà vu.
Cinema was a reference and, if you know your films, you'll also know that Miuccia has an interest in duplicitous and ambiguous characters, shadowy women like the female protagonists in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, or good and bad heroines à la Isa Miranda in Adventure in Diamonds, Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, or obsessive Betty in Jean-Jacques Beineix's Betty Blue (the show music mix also included its soundtrack - the same film was also referenced in Holly Fulton's A/W 13 catwalk show in London).
Duplicity may have been one of the keys to decode this collection - think about the rough tweed Vs the shiny gold leather designs or the asymmetric and unelegant fall of a skirt against the embellished sequined motifs.
Though this time rather than Antonioni (one of her favourite directors), Miuccia seemed to be channelling noir films à la Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (the runway set) and Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (moods and atmospheres but also the furs) or the covers of '50s True Cases of Women in Crime magazine with their slightly dishevelled fatal women in metallic high heeled shoes, the collection as a whole wasn't a new breakthrough, but more of a "Miuccia redux", a sort of revisitation of old themes and a pastiche of previously seen ideas.
You would have expected something slightly more revolutionary (accepting Greenpeace's challenge would have been a good starting point towards a more sustainable revolution...), but, judging from the fantastically magniloquent and grand words that were shed about it, the media genuinely loved it proving that, maybe, the extremely trendy kaleidoscopic digital prints young fashionistas are so passionate about lose points against less outlandish - and therefore more wearable - old style luxurious clothes.
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