5,700 miles away: Prada takes Shanghai
In this future-thinking hub of 21st-century life, the Italian fashion house champions a return to simplicity.
‘The world is a big place now, we are obliged to go everywhere, to see everything,” said Miuccia Prada backstage at her spring/summer 2020 menswear show, fittingly staged in Shanghai.
A sense of scale was clearly on the designer’s mind; a monolithic event in the new global epicentre of consumerism – a first for Mrs Prada, who usually chooses her Milanese homestead as her base – and a disused power station on the banks of the Huangpu river as her cavernous location. But amid this hubbub, and perhaps despite the fact that every corner of the globe is now meticulously curated and beaming at you from your iphone via social media, the designer went back to a baseline wardrobe that riffed on ideals of calm simplicity.
“I wanted to create something simple, something fresh. It wasn’t about Shanghai or China, the location didn’t influence the collection. Instead I just wanted simplicity in the volume, in the colours,” she said.
Deciphering the meaning of the seemingly clairvoyant Prada – where she goes, others follow – has become the fashion equivalent of learning code, and the challenge this season came in the context, with the clothes shown against the backdrop of a superpower in terms of luxury and technology.
The Chinese boom in luxury consumerism has not so much shifted the goalposts for brands as blown them up, with 20 per cent year-onyear growth making for a 40 per cent share of the entire global market, and millennials making up a huge part of the footfall. When Prada recently featured a Chinese movie star in their ad campaigns, a viral trend was born of social media users snapping their Prada receipts to show their devotion to him. That’s consumerism in 2019: a holy trinity of brand power, spending power and social media.
But that white noise doesn’t filter into Miuccia Prada’s world view; the clothes were unfettered and clean, with a childlike sense of naivety: soft-fit linen trousers and simple tops, jackets with chalky-toned panels, childlike postcard prints, a
Nasa-esque logo and candy colours.
If millennials have overtaken Gen Z and Baby Boomers as the group for brands to focus on, then the latter’s traditional shirt was remade for a millennial world, elongated and yanked into new proportions – your average twentysomething with a weighty Instagram following does not wear his dad’s shirts. The elongated tops could double as the luxury interpretation of a tabard, but let’s not dwell on proletariat attire in 21st-century China.
And there was plenty here for any generation of man. The cagoules and windbreakers in Crayola colours, and splashy prints on nifty zip-up bombers married dynamism with a touch of whimsy, while elongated rugby shirting and cricket stripes added a youthful enthusiasm.
In arguably the most high tech and surveillance-centric epicentre of the world – China will next year roll out a social credit score system that will “punish” and “reward” every citizen – Prada made the case for taking things back to a simpler time. Which couldn’t be more appealing.