What is real or fake news today? Are we about to be taken over by AI and Chatbot? Two themes in a thought-provoking show by Prada, where half the detailing was literally faux.
Staged Sunday afternoon in the fashion show space of the Fondazione Prada, the collection was a tour de force of trompe l’oeil. This season, the big idea of design duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons was a series of great new herringbone woolen pants, where all the belts were colored into the fabric just below the waist. Talk about top notch trompe l’oeil – especially as these belets looked like real burnished leather.
A notion continued in knitwear, where all the collars were also colorful trompe l’oeil. Renaissance masters would have been impressed.
“It’s about reality or the lack of it. How it’s hard for many people to tell the difference between what is real and what is made up,” argued Miuccia in the backstage of the show.
Even the set – which was something else – felt ambiguous about its purpose. A long semi-circular white path with a wicket fence which twisted up five meters to a white shed. A beachcomber’s shanty house in Australia? A writer’s hidden weekend residence on Cape Cod?
Around the twisting catwalk the teenage cast marched, rapidly. Not so much skinny, as very, very scrawny. Gone were the sensitive intellectuals that used to populate Prada shows, these lads were clubbing kids, just like the pounding dark industrial techno that was the soundtrack.
“Yes, they were very young, because I believe that youth is the future,” La Signora Prada told a gaggle of writers post-show.
Whose cast’s figures all helped make this the leanest silhouette one has witnessed in eons in Milan. And the most minimalist fashion statement.
For Prada, this was also a surprisingly graphic collection, featuring a dozen T-Shirts on which were printed graphic illustrations of clowns, jesters, wilted flowers and circus folk.
Which turned out to be by Bernard Buffet, who curiously was once the boyfriend of Pierre Bergé, for eight years. Before Pierre became partner of Yves Saint Laurent.
A painter who reputation rose rapidly and then plummeted, so much so that even his former champion inflicted on him the cruelest cut. Disparagingly Bergé later referred to Buffet as “a Sunday painter,” meaning a part-time maker of pastiche.
But at least his figurative paintings felt alive today in Milan in this Prada show.
Via The Fashion Network