Talk about fluid tailoring: Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer”—with its chorus lyric “I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal” hadn’t even begun when this Prada show’s most spectacular moment of release left the crowd ooh-ing out loud in mass satisfaction. The third look—a fringed print white shirt and black schoolboy short—had just passed by on the industrial meshed steel runway. Suddenly, irregular lines of slime started oozing from the ceiling, falling on either side of the models. It settled into a pale green puddle as it slowly drained away. In its free fall sticky state, the gunky stuff that waterfalled down looked like something left by Slimer in Ghostbusters, or the alien in Alien, or a snail on a rug, or—on certain happy occasions—humans having a good time.
Said Mrs. Prada afterwards: “Now, in this time, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas.” Together she and Raf Simons dressed their spring 2024 men in outfits that echoed the relationship between that rigid runway mesh and the glinting plasma that spurted from and through it. The starting point was a tailored silhouette featuring broad shoulders bolstered by (removable) pads, a cinched waist, with elongated jacket skirts and sleeves. Below were high-waisted bottom halves that (when not hemmed as shorts mid thigh), ballooned around the groin from the naval thanks to generous side pleats before tapering down to the ankle.
Simons said that this silhouette was meant to echo the heroically enhancing tailoring paradigm of the 1940s. It was Prada-fied through a process of reduction and enlightenment: archaic heavy wools were upgraded with ultralight modern equivalents, and instead of the heavy architecture of tailored construction, those jackets were as unconfining as the lightest poplin shirt. Said Simons: “When we think about the body we also think about the idea of the inside and the outside, about the way a body is not still. Very often in the sartorial, it ends up being a very architectural construction and the body is partly restricted.” He added that artists whose work had informed the collection included H.R. Giger (who birthed Alien before John Hurt) and Joseph Beuys, who exhibited disembodied editions of his own heavy rabbit felt suit.
Through and from this heavy-looking but ultra-light starting point, other elements began to push, ooze, or burst to the surface. There were those floral shirts, whose fringing and sleeves took them one evolutionary Prada step beyond its signature Hawaiian shirts. There were traditional shirts that had been subject to a freakish growth spurt, transformed into full length coats. There was a section of constriction free denim jeans topped by functionally expansive multi pocket work gilets and then fine-gauge knit shirting in navy, through which luxuriant furry tufts appeared to be sprouting.
The gilets reappeared in faux fur, maybe as another nod to Beuys, as the color scheme softened from the opening black to shades of blush. Then the three-button Beuys jacket shape was transformed from a tailored piece into what most closely resembled a sailing parka, cut in technical nylon and then heavy weathered leather. Toward the end, the pockets and the flowers were commingled and conjoined on shirting in blush and a pale coffee brown: The pockets were built into the shirting and the flowers, as painted resin ornaments, sprouted from them. Being Prada, this menswear collection was designed to stimulate the cerebrum as much as any other body part. But it was also consistent with the recently-repressed animal urge also unleashed (pornographically) at DSquared2 and (sensually) at Dolce & Gabbana this season. Masculine sexuality, of whatever flavor and inclination, is coursing through the runways of Milan once more.
