Miuccia Prada makes such cultish clothes due to her eye for detail and always-unique sensibilities, but it is also because her feminist instincts always seem to square with what super-smart women want to be wearing right now. That, and her lefty sense of humor, which manifested for Fall in corsets on almost every garment, a play on the waist trainers every B-list celeb and their mom is hawking on Instagram, but also—with half the models looking like avant-garde Allied nurses in WWII—a commentary on how we’re hemmed in by expectations of us as caretakers.
Or something. As Vogue reported, Prada was a bit opaque about it, allowing us to make our own inferences:
“We need to understand who we are today,” Prada declared afterward, surrounded by a three-deep crowd of female journalists. “Everything is symbolic. It is like a collage of what is happy or painful, of whether you are feeling beautiful or horrible, when you have love or no love. I thought of it as like someone who has all the clothes she’s ever had on the floor in front of her in the morning, and she must choose how she’s going to assemble herself.”
PJ Harvey’s gritty, storied “To Bring You My Love” soundtracked the first part of the show, and offered a potentially more revealing insight:
And I’ve traveled over
Dry earth and floods
Hell and high water
To bring you my love
The women were world travelers and the soundtrack connoted as such, their sailor caps inferring their itinerance and giant charm chokers brandishing keys and flowers like souvenirs they’d collected along the way. None of it was obvious and, watching the video of the show, it’s always striking how deeply Prada seems to understand and connect with the fundamental depth and complexities of women, and why she is one of our greatest designers. Especially when her work feels like advocacy for that depth and complexity, as this collection does.
Contact the author at julianne@jezebel.com.