Let’s pretend for an impossible moment that we know nothing about Miuccia Prada, Miu Miu or the intellectual framework and history around them. In that state of innocence, it’s perfectly possible to look at this show and just mumble along happily to yourself: ‘Oh, nice long coats! Those are smart suits. What brilliant colors. Ah, it looks pencil skirts are back. Nice knitted cardigan jackets. Someone’s going to jump at those rose-printed dirndls. Those ’50s/’60s dresses—love them. And, what, wait, is that actually fur?’
And so on. Because this collection was packed with great, wearable, straightforward, real, unmessed-about-with clothes (well, except for the ‘fur’ lookalikes, which were shearling). People representing a couple of generations were wearing them—cheery, for a change. And with that, it’s so very tempting to say, thank you, basta and goodnight! Because does thinking and talking about fashion always have to feel like an intelligence test?
Well, of course, we do know Mrs. Prada, and she has her iconographies, and despite observational intelligence being at a low ebb after 95 days of fashion shows, we must also give her complexities a whirl. Firstly, there was a video installation by Cécile B. Evans playing on various screens. The narrative, in abridged form, was about what happens to memories stored on devices after a digital apocalypse. A lone scientist-translator who may have been a sole survivor was tinkering with retrieving a woman’s memory. An old hand-held video camera floated across the scene like a lost spaceship at one point. It ended up with the woman’s brain apparently being downloaded into a digital hamster, with no human in sight.
And then the screens faded to a desolate blizzard of static, just as they did two days and 20 shows ago at Balenciaga. Holding onto memories and treasuring what makes us human becomes more important than ever. That’s why it was hard not to see the elements of the collection as pages from Miuccia Prada’s Milanese autobiography. Her excellency re-cut memories of the five narrow, late ’60s, early ’70s double-breasted coats which opened the show. Then there were the askew strands of pearls; the discreet charm of the lady-suits (including a searingly good one in neon green); the fake minks, mimicking the real ones which used to be seen everywhere on the Via Montenapoleone in winter. Also the maid’s white cotton uniform coat—or was it that of a seamstress?—worn on its own, or as another layer under a superb gray menswear wool three-button coat.
And there were the baby clothes: tiny dresses or woolly cardigans worn with colorful ribbed tights. When Mrs. Prada came out at the end of the show, she had little to say, but it was to the point. “I think they are classics. Everyone can choose from them to be a child, or a lady. Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15-years-old, or a lady near death.”
As for the connection with the video content she had commissioned from Evans, Mrs. Prada claimed it was pure creative coincidence. “I didn’t know what she was doing. But when you’re interested in the contemporary world, different people in different fields are more or less working on the same things, like that.” Well, that’s a memory to store away.
