All The Buzz In Fashion

1 RESTRAIN & RELEASE

Miuccia Prada is a bellwether of the fashion industry; her every move has editors and buyers alike sitting up to take notice and rethinking their fashion trajectories. Her radical idea this season was simplicity and as our pandemic-ravaged world grows ever more chaotic, this concept has in turn become increasingly reassuring and resonant. While past seasons have seen her proposing beef ed-up Day-G lo nylon sportswear and zany Instagram-bait graphics, for spring/summer 2020, she had timelessness and elegance on her mind. Of course, Prada being Prada, simplicity wasn’t as simple as it sounded. Her vision of timelessness was rooted in times gone past. As we enter a new ’20s, she looked back to the old ’20s; dresses were elongated and waistless, but unlike the beaded extravagance of last century’s flapper frocks, Prada’s had a distinctly humble quality—rendered in gauzy fabrics such as linen and muslin. The accessories added to the homespun vibe, with cloche hats pieced together from scraps of leather and python skin, and necklaces strung together from seashells. She tempered the ’20s flavour with a strictness and minimalism borrowed respectively from the ’40s and ’90s. And then because Prada never does the literal and the expected, she electrified the whole thing with occasional flashes of richness in the form of emerald velvet, gold leather and decadent Art Deco flourishes. The result was a new kind of glamour with roots in the past but an eye firmly on the future.