Prada has once again brough celebrities, fashionistas and socialites together for its traditional show during Milan’s Fashion Week Men. The F/W23 collection was designed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons and is a further exploration of the fundamentals of fashion. It champions its continuing meaning, value and significance today. The show took place in the space of the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada – conceived by AMO – which exposes the concrete shell of the building. Within this stripped, raw panorama, dimensions are re-engineered, radically altered – a ceiling rises slowly to transmute the space from intimate to grand, altered scale in turn shifting our perspective on the clothing within. This process echoes the garments themselves, elongated or abbreviated. They demonstrate a reconstruction of meaning, of identity, activated through a minimal gesture.
The Prada collection is clean and elegant. If you were to describe it, comfort, exaggeration, an intimacy would come to mind. Paradigms of fashion combined with paradigms of Prada, literal and ideological fragments of heritage inherited by new garments. Reductionist tailoring, graphic shards of print and knit, laid on bared skin. Extraneous details are shorn from garments that wrap the form in a tactile exchange, against a naked body. Silhouettes are emphatic, amplified and attenuated, exploring extreme vicissitude between couture volumes through the architecture of the clothes.
The show somewhat followed what seems to be a general theme during MFW: back to basics. The show in itself was another standout during MFW. Enhypen had the crowd go crazy. Hundreds of K pop fans gathered outside the venue to try to get a glimpse on their idols.
Images courtesy of Prada
