Miuccia Prada has always said that her impulses for Miu Miu are much more spontaneous, from the heart, than the propositions she formulates for Prada. But where did her off-the-cuff ideas spring from in this of all seasons, after she’d essentially stripped back Prada to what magnetized people in the ’90s? From “a base which is serious and structured, and after that each person does what they wish with it,” she extemporized. “Something raw, simple, naive, not a big deal. Suggesting a way of dressing, and after they’re free to do their own thing. That is even reflected in the wood, the set, like theaters where people used to do improvisation.”
Improvisational theater was Prada’s first outlet for creativity, after all; she spent five years at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan before she even thought of joining the family accessories firm. This was her take two of the season on going back to her beginnings, then; and one into which it’s easy to read a much more telling autobiographical backstory. Here was a group of young women with home-crimped late-1940s/early-1950s hair, doing their level best to be Italian-movie-star glamorous in a time of postwar make do and mend.
Remember what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers used to be able to do with not very much, she seemed to say. The idea of altering, remaking, and sex-ifying a wardrobe that might be limited by resources—but never by indomitable female ingenuity—came through. These were girls who seemed to have altered the buttons on their coats; made new summer dresses by patching the top of a satin cocktail dress to a printed curtain; decided to add a flounce to a skirt or a shoulder strap with a bit of spare fabric; maybe even painted the flowers on their leather coats themselves.
It wasn’t the first time this season that the notion of converting household linen into garments has come up—here you could imagine girls who’d cut up bedsheets to run up into dresses and long, slim skirts on home sewing machines. There were Miu Miu demonstrations of how to make even the scrappiest, rattiest old knitwear off-the-shoulder sexy. Distinct echoes of Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren as neorealismo movie heroines ran through it. Even the accessories spelled Italian ingenuity in times of scarce resources—unmistakable references to the type of wooden wedges made famous by Salvatore Ferragamo; to the bamboo made into bag handles by Guccio Gucci.
And so on. There was plenty that didn’t fit this playbill—luxurious leather gilets, much in the way of brightly colored duchesse satin. Miu Miu must sell merchandise that appeals in many markets. But strangely—or appropriately—given the way the world is going, it was the “old” message that read as the newest. If we’re entering a time of buying less and being careful not to throw things away, look how much creative fun a girl can still have.