People visiting in the next few weeks (until 1st February) the Fondazione Prada in Milan will be able to see a film festival entitled "Flesh, Mind and Spirit" featuring a selection of 15 movies.
The films were chosen by director Alejandro González Iñárritu (just nominated for an Academy Award as best director for The Revenant) and film critic Elvis Mitchell according to these three keywords and include Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket and Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Flesh), Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Roy Andersson's You, The Living (Mind), Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son and Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light (Spirit).
The curators of the festival chose films that were full of emotion; in more or less the same way, Miuccia Prada tries to send on her runways designs that may reveal hidden emotions, complex narratives or well-conceived meanings to the discerning critic. For her A/W 2016 menswear and Pre-Fall 2016 collections, Prada constructed a large story.
She opted for a set recreating via simple multi-levelled chipboard panels a town square (suspended between De Chirico's mysterious squares and M.C. Escher's illusions) where people of different social status and backgrounds meet (well, that's her vision since, usually, most of us don't really mingle with people sitting in the front row...).
Both men and women sashayed down the runway in sailor hats, tailored navy jackets, naval capes and peacoats with detached collars, lapels and hoods.
Maybe Miuccia thought these detachable pieces could be a greater solution to cumbersome coats, especially with global warming (though expect the collars and lapels to be as expensive as entire coats if they will ever be sold separately...).
At times there was a state of disarray with frayed knit elbow patches, worn fabrics and mis-buttoned shirts, not to mention the multi-coloured knitted patchwork cardigans of the sort you will surprisingly discover at the bottom of your grandmother/aunt's wardrobe and shrunken checked jackets with a vintage look upon them.
The naval look prevailed, even though this was no rime of the modern mariner à la Alexander McQueen S/S 16 - this was indeed a sort of melancholic odyssey.
The atmosphere was made somber by the soundtrack comprising Nick Cave's cavernously singing 'The Mercy Seat' and his duet with Kylie Minogue, 'Where The Wild Roses Grow' and by the fact that the nautical references in the collection rather than pointing towards romantic sailors looks as seen in Follow the Fleet, seemed to be pointing towards Joe on a misty canal trip on a bleak barge in Alexander Trocchi's Young Adam.
Somebody spotted in Miuccia's explanations to journalists and critics references to the vast expanses of water crossed by migrants to find a new hope and a better life, but the naval mood could also be an allegory referencing the fact that we all sail through troubled seas and that we are often physically or emotionally shipwrecked.
The white shirts with prints of puzzling artworks by French artist, illustrator, writer, director and porn actor Christophe Chemin added another layer to this multi-textured collection: one showed a table with mice enjoying a feast of fruit and lusciously juicy broken pomegranates; another included wild animals, mythical beasts, weird creatures and dinosaurs trapped in a concrete jungle; a third one showed Cleopatra kissing a Marine.
One blue prints showed instead a series of historical figures - Che Guevara, Pier Paolo Pasolini (a long time ago Chemin contributed to a volume on Pasolini's Theorem published by Skira), Nina Simone and Sigmund Freud - engaged in a riotous battle with classical figures was maybe an allegory for all of us, with the designer suggesting we should maybe try and know the past and history to understand the present and foresee the future.
Knowing history has always been an advantage for Prada and it worked well in the collection as Miuccia remixed capes and recreated them in denim, proving that an officer's coat can still work pretty well in our times once it is de-contextualised and a sailor's top in leather can provide a new perspective on a classic uniform; dresses from the '40s were also reinvented as backless draped satin and velvet ensembles, and sexed up by adding high heels and diamond-patterned woollen tights.
Almost to emphasise her invitation to know the past, Prada included among the next season's accessories a modern version of the chatelaine (was she fascinated by Mrs Hughes' chatelaine in Downton Abbey? View this photo): models on her runway wore indeed bunches of keys and leather bounded notebooks jangling against their crotches.
Before the 1850s pockets were not too common in women's garments and a chatelaine (directly derived from the sets of keys held by the mistress of a castle) was a useful accessory: chatelaines such as the ones included in this post (from the V&A Museum collection) were usually attached to a belt via a single clip or clasp, and would make small items such as scissors, thimbles, buttonhooks, watches, household seals, keys, money and a small almanack easily accessible for housewives and housekeepers.
So, in conclusion, what could we say about this collection? Well, beware of the fashion allegory: a sailor's hat is also a flotation device; a chatelaine often indicated the status of a woman in a household, with the most powerful one who usually directed also the servants, holding the key to many desks, locked cabinets and rooms. Maybe Miuccia is telling us that even in unstable financial markets Prada will keep on floating and she will keep on holding the power.
So, rather than being pessimistic about the world, she was just being tremendously optimistic about herself, reminding us that she's still the keeper of keys to gold chests, otherwise why were people deliriously screaming at the very end of the show when she came out to take her bow?
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