It was kind of a mind fuck to go to Prada. There, ostensibly to view her women’s clothes for Fall, a couple of hundred people waited, crowding and jostling ever closer to an elevator at the new Rem Koolhaas extension to the Prada Foundation. It didn’t come. On reflection, this modern convenience was probably never going to arrive. It took a good 15 minutes for the social experiment to work, for despair to set in, after which there was a collective decision to walk up four floors. And there we took our seats at the edge of an abyss. A brain-fooling black-mirrored floor seemed to fall away to infinity in front of us. Straight ahead through plate glass windows was a dark cityscape illuminated by neon Prada signs—a cartoon flaming heeled shoe, bunches of bananas, a spider, a monkey, a dinosaur. Just before the show, a drone appeared, systematically hovering to record the show and audience reaction, from the outside in.
Troubling, dystopian sci-fi experiences are the fashion sensation of the moment; the point of decadence where immersion in ideas seems to supersede or question the validity of the clothes. Prada’s seemed sketchily put together from hefty utilitarian layers of workwear and tulle, assembled entirely from man-made materials, starting with the company’s black Pocono-nylon padded rainwear.
Glowing fluorescents and digital prints were contrasted with tweeds, squared-off parkas, and construction worker vests. Approximations of strapless cocktail dresses had corporate ID cards pinned to the breast. Rubber boots appropriated nylon drawstring leg-coverings. It was a disrupting picture of layered dissonances with a deliberately done-in-haste feel.
What could it mean? Miuccia Prada posits fashion as a live commentary which is eternally suspended in the space between politics, sociology, and commerce, searching as it must for the relevant attractions which will make women buy in the moment. She joked with journalists that this show was her “little revenge on the art world, occupying the art space” that she herself will soon fill with the collections acquired by her own family’s Prada Foundation. Fashion, she argues, is just as serious an endeavor as contemporary art, even though it is routinely looked down upon by art world academics. With this collection, she jolted her fashion audience into the realms of performance art; a feminist statement, mashing the bourgeois clothes of her brand signatures to produce a vision which she described as “for the strength of women going out in the violence. My dream,” she said, “is for women to be able to go out in the street and not be afraid. I wanted to have the freedom exaggerated.”
For anyone who was there, it was a discomfortingly layered, unforgettable experience—that in itself is an achievement in a world of so much bland, unchallenging fashion. It also provokes questioning. The use of so many unsustainable man-made fabrics is a big one. In that, it mirrors the menswear collection Prada put out a few weeks ago. Art is art, but fashion is the bigger culprit in damaging the planet. How good it would be to see Miuccia Prada begin to turn her creative intelligence to that subject.
