Sheer graphic perfection
Miuccia Prada explored clichés of beauty in her looks for next winter.
Her woman is a Technicolour 1950s housewife, perfectly dressed and coiffed, serving up neat trays of pink or green canapes, like the ones that greeted visitors to Prada’s show.
Her double-breasted pantsuit, in a spongy, stretch fabric, had a Claymation effect — part of Prada’s ploy to explore the space between the real and the fake, like two parallel universes.
For Prada the exploration wasn’t just about teasing out the irony of what is accepted as beautiful, as she sprinkled the looks with oversized sequins, bows and fur. It also becomes an indictment of the growing dissonance with the selves we project, or as she puts it, “the reality of us, and all the flatness as you invent a reality that doesn’t exist”.
Tweed suits, dresses and coats are festooned with rhinestone floral brooches as well as their parallel universe cousins, flat plastic representations that resemble shiny sprigs of parsley.
The most merchandisable pieces in of the collection were a series of ostrich skin dresses and skirts — but Prada couldn’t leave well enough alone. She mutated that circular ostrich pattern into a wavy print on a vinyl-like material — pairing ostrich with what the designer cheekily called its genetic mutation.
Bold contrasting colours contributed to the unreality of it all — olive set against aquamarine, pink against flesh tones, and camel with grey and princess pink.
The looks were finished with long opera gloves, the kind that landed Alma Clooney under the glare of the fashion police at the Golden Globes, only these are in ostrich, or a shorter, more utilitarian model. Shoes included boots featuring a wavy rubbery sole in contrasting colour.
Kendall Jenner is keeping up her runway streak, strutting for Fendi in one of Lagerfeld’s puffy parkas with a matching mini-skirt and black fur boots. The halfsister of Kim Kardashian, who made her New York runway debut just a year ago, is becoming one of the most recognisable faces on the circuit.
In New York, she walked eight major runway shows, including for Oscar de la Renta in an elegant tulle and organza gown. In London last week, she took it a bit easier, modelling a gothic look for the brand Giles but also seeing how the other half lives from the front row of Topshop Unique.