MORPHOLO GIES
“HER WORK IS IDENTIFIED MORE WITH AN ATTITUDE—A PRADA KIND OF THING—THAN A PARTICULAR PRODUCT” A natty 2014 coat in doublefaced wool with an opaque appearance and visible weave misfit than muse. Botticelli, like Prada, was playing with form, using it to provoke. The beauty lies with the imperfection. “Ugly is attractive,” Mrs has said. “Ugly is exciting.” The Metropolitan Museum in New York called her work “ugly chic.” Mrs made ugly cool. Whatever the good/bad taste or beauty/ugly dialectic, what has distinguished Miuccia’s approach is the discipline she brings to the aesthetic. Never trained as a designer, she applies academic rigour to the business in the same way she brought it to political study.
Meantime, we’re at the Specimens window. Shoes and bags combined from diverse seasons, surrounded by examples focusing on the painstaking process of design and prototyping that goes into each. The bag is the starting point, the canvas, for jewel accents, fur, water snake, a robot key chain or two, intricate beadwork, feathers and leather appliques. Each bag, in its hyper-deco glory, the haptic history of womanhood and its multiple moods, desires and guises.
Beside it are shoes. And contradiction. Chunky-heeled Mary Janes in antique tobacco stand beside a futuristic Japanese geta sandal. Thorny vines and delicate flowers grow off one specimen; agony and ecstasy with each stylised footstep. And the towering mutant espadrille creepers dubbed Frankenshoes. There’s even a pair of flippers—where Mrs dips a tantalising toe into the savage beauty of Alexander Mcqueen’s creations. Mrs and the evolution continues, and its Pradaspheric.