“As times become increasingly complex, clothes become straightforward, unostentatious, machines for living and tools for action and activity.” So said the press notes for The Show That Never Happened, which was a digitally delivered group installation of five Prada-facing films by Willy Vanderperre, Juergen Teller, Joanna Piotrowska, Martine Syms, and Terence Nance. From the looks of it, they were all made at the Fondazione Prada, the edifice constructed to house not only the company’s extensive art collection, but also now used as the site of its healthy-season shows.
A nice touch was that the films—which ran consecutively with the addition of a quick final walk at the end before Mrs. Prada’s usual fleeting, half-lateral bow—came to 11 minutes, the Platonic ideal duration of a live, actually there fashion show. Yet to compare the experience of a live Prada show (for those fortunate enough to go) with a product such as this is to compare theater to cinema.
As directors of our experience, however, Prada’s collaborators delivered some diverting mise-en-scènes in which their sections of this pared-back Prada collection overlapped. First up, Vanderperre went for shivering violins over backlit, dynamic shift-focus shots of narrow tailoring silhouettes in black and white (a mild impediment to checking out the clothes, but atmospheric). Second out, Teller dug into the guts of the building to film and photograph a section that mixed full-skirted black nylon evening dresses against smocked workwear, plus more ascetic suiting played against sportswear. Whatever your platform, the high-hoiked white track pants and tucked-in tie and work shirt proposition was something to behold. To this watcher, all the finger clicking in Piotrowska’s chapter triggered a Pavlovian association more Paco Rabanne than Prada, but the industrial workwear—albeit via black and white—appeared soothingly institutional.
Syms’s film stood out thanks to the interplay between the Marchesi-green upholstery of the Fondazione Prada’s cinema and the clothes that were filtered to match it. The meta-meta layering of screen-on-screen added an extra level of visual distance in which to greenly lean. And the sometimes collarless suiting, rib knits, and buttress-armed outerwear featured the fuss-free characteristics of the collection’s rhetoric.
Finally to chapter five, shot by Nance in Piazza Adriano Olivetti, immediately behind the Fondazione. Here the reflective layers of its three pools and mirrored surrounding buildings played a beguiling foil to Linea Rossa–labeled sportswear, lots of it white, seemingly tennis-y or sailing-y but also broadly not so sport-specific. Some of it was shot through a window onto the overlook that we’d all got stuck on before the first fall 2018 show at the Fondazione. An exploding moon and the ghostly survival blanket were disconcerting details that gnawed at the harp-calmed serenity of the whole.
Usually chez Prada there is the tooth-and-claw ritual of the postshow debrief. Sometimes the throng seems close to swallowing Mrs. Prada whole. Today all she had to do was sign off in an email. In it she said: “I think that our job as fashion designers is to create clothes for people, that is the honesty of it. That is really the value of our job—to create beautiful, intelligent clothes. This season, we focused on that idea: It is about clothes, about giving value to pieces. The clothes are simple, but with the concept of simplicity as an antidote to useless complication. This is a moment that requires some seriousness, a moment to think and to reflect on things. What do we do, what is fashion for, what are we here for? What can fashion contribute to a community?”
Simplicity can be complicated and complication can be simple. As Mrs. Prada and her peers work to anticipate how change alters the specifications of taste and clothes—a.k.a. “machines for living”—it will be fascinating to watch the architecture of fashion change too. Today’s complicated presentation of the simple seemed a strong starting point.
