Despite its poolside location, the Prada spring/summer 2015 menswear show was hardly beach-ready. Instead of free-flowing, light-hearted designs, Miuccia Prada sent out measured, restrained, and conservative pieces, which for their primness were all the more powerful.
The color palette was, appropriately, a mix of warm and cool, featuring dark blues, fawn browns, and demure beiges. In a slight throwback to the 70s, the collection was full of bygone, classic silhouettes and emphatic tailoring, highlighted by “stitching” (actually embroidery). Neat sweaters, leather overcoats, and simple shirts occasionally displayed dour patterns that recalled mid-century modernist stylings. Prada explained that this choice was natural, “It is what looks more new. I see it sometimes myself when I go in my wardrobe and everything looks wrong. And you pick up something so old-fashioned it is like the only new thing.”
Image Courtesy of Prada
Equally subdued were the womenswear designs, which went out alongside the menswear. In boxy skirts and button-up dresses, models showed the translation of the aesthetic, which for Prada, was more meaningful. For her, “the combination is more real. It is more today. Otherwise it looks like we are in classes, in the time of my grandfather, women divided from men.”
In this manner, while the collection hinted to the past, it was still predominantly forward-looking—without losing its humor. According to Prada, The swimming pool “was a joke, an irony on what is classic. But what is classic is also a very serious question.” Irony and pensiveness, warm and cool, male and female, classic and modern thus become the defining juxtapositions of a somber Prada summer.
Image Courtesy of Prada
