Celebrities have been thin on the ground in Milan, in part thanks to fashion week’s conjunction with the Oscars, but a group came out for Prada, including Gal Gadot, Maya Hawke, Simone Ashley and Hunter Schafer.
Ms. Schafer was wearing a pink top and gray briefs under a black satin coat, about a week after having worn a floral Prada sundress to the Independent Spirit Awards. Which was right after she had posted a video on TikTok noting that she had just received a new passport that, thanks to a Trump administration executive order, identified her as male. Even though, as a trans woman, she had had female gender markers on her documents since she was a young teen.
“It’s impossible,” said Raf Simons, the Prada co-creative director, backstage, of Ms. Schafer’s situation. “But it’s happening.”
And it’s part of the reason the question of femininity — what it looks like and what might define it now and in the future instead of in the past — was the question of the season for Mr. Simons and Miuccia Prada.
Or rather, as Mrs. Prada said backstage, “What kind of femininity can you maintain in this difficult moment?”
We are conditioned, Mr. Simons added, to think about that issue in a classic way, which generally is also a clichéd way: to embrace Ozempic and corsets and restrictions.
But what if, they asked, you liberated yourself from all that? What if you ran screaming in the opposite direction?
Cue a show conceived as a riposte to the whole idea of female stereotype. One that blew a raspberry in the eye of the male gaze and then turned its back for good measure. To a certain extent the exploration of ugliness and the imposition of unattainable female ideals have always been the existential subjects of Mrs. Prada’s career. Just as the tension between what she is trying to say (something political) with the seeming frivolity of her chosen vehicle (luxury fashion) has driven her designs. And her backstage conversations.
Rarely, however, has the process looked so imperative. Or so much, frankly, like she and Mr. Simons were trolling the Miss Universe establishment and testing the limits of the Prada mystique.
These are black times? Fine. Enter the little black dress — only imagine Audrey Hepburn playing the mad woman in Tiffany’s attic, storming out to a techno beat, ratting up her hair and letting out her seams. Then the little black dress might be a loose black schmatta, with just the ghost of a bow or some big, fabric-covered buttons. And things might mutate from there.
Nothing fit quite right. Not the oversize knits that looked like sweater dresses gone survivalist, or the sofa-print Doris Day housedresses that seemed to have been pulled straight off a love seat, or the leather paper-bag waist skirts so un-body-con they jounced around the rib cage on their own. Instead of lingerie dressing there were scrunched-up pajama separates with the wrinkles baked in; instead of necklaces, jeweled ribbed necklines that appeared to have been severed from well-behaved cardigans; instead of buttons on a big gray overcoat, clusters of pearls, like little iridescent pustules. Their reshaping was more of a de-shaping.
The result was aggressively, kind of thrillingly, unflattering (well, except for the lush shearling jackets that looked like mink, and the slick trousers — a few pieces have to be commercial). But it was also purposeful. These clothes weren’t trying to be charming and glamorous and failing. They were trying to force confrontation. They aimed to please no one except the body inside, freed from any binding, and the woman who inhabits that body.
They definitely weren’t pretty, but they were something even more compelling: They were relevant.
