If Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were to be believed, their latest Prada collection was as basic, as unadorned, as a bowl of spaghetti al pomodoro.
“The only thing we said when we started talking was let’s change it, let’s make it completely different, let’s make it simple,” Prada said. The pair were feeling reactionary. Simons, accurately, brought up that no one on the street really wears runway clothes anymore.
Sometimes, he said, fashion “doesn’t feel new, fresh or young anymore.” We are in one of those times. They were seeking clarity, per Simons. They found it, Prada said, in “a show based on one item.”
That item? Jeans, which she hailed as “the most universal object.”
Wait, the whole collection is jeans?
Well, not exactly. “Slightly twisted, of course,” Simons said.
And twisted the collection was. Each model — and there were men and women walking the show — was in some variation of compressed five-pocket trousers, cropped to the ankle and about as wide there as a Negroni glass. Not a single pair was in conventional blue. They took shape in black leather, burgundy leather and Kermit green leather. Some were translucent. Many were white as pure cocaine.
Surrounding these “jeans,” the models wore other building blocks, like a cinched-to-the-navel leather jacket, sweater vests in trippy Deco prints, leather truckers with Mark Rothko-esque swatches on the back and softly slouched blazers. The show felt indebted to Helmut Lang, a master at taking what would be a familiar form on paper and doing something radical with it. (He also had a thing for white jeans and trucker jackets.)
