Prada’s Extrovert-Introvert A/W '21 Show

For autumn/winter 2021, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons proposed a post-lockdown collection suspended between our lives in isolation and the desire to go out. Anders Christian Madsen reports.

The collection adapted Prada’s menswear

Miuccia Prada’s men’s collections have always forecasted her women’s shows. Under her creative partnership with Raf Simons – who cut his teeth in menswear – that dialogue has now intensified. Their second collection together was the ‘hers’ to the men’s show’s ‘his’, not only staged within the same faux fur set – as Prada tradition dictates – but proposing the same garments, tempered for a women’s wardrobe. “There was a sense of connecting men and women: the masculine in women and the feminine in men,” Raf Simons said in a video conference after the show. “They’re classic men’s silhouettes, but by changing the materials they become more feminine.”

Garments said “look at me, but don’t”

The masculine infiltration was exemplified in the suits that opened the show, their sleeves rolled up to form ladylike gigot shapes, or in the diagonal corduroy outerwear repeated from the men’s show, and the essentially genderless bodysuits likewise carried over. Like the men’s show, garments that isolate and shield the body were rendered in vivid patterns, colours or textures that made you stand out even more: giant faux fur coats and wraps, bodysuits and oversized cardigans in vivid patterns ranging Art Nouveau, Art Deco, the 1960s and 70s, and enveloping yet wildly sequined coats.

Prada said optimism is mounting

You might interpret Prada and Simons’s balance between the quiet and the gaudy as a post-pandemic approach to dressing: introvert girls in extrovert clothes. “What’s building up is the desire for movement and action and new energy and fashion. The desire to release again,” Simons said. “Slowly something is mounting, some more desire and excitement. Maybe it’s not correct but it’s there. Optimism is mounting very much,” Prada said. She expressed it in workwear jackets that desperately wanted to shape-shift into decadent opera coat, their sleeves dramatically expanding into an evening silhouette.

There were remnants of life in lockdown

Occasionally interrupted by rave-like scenes of models dancing and having a good time, the digital runway show was scored by a throbbing techno beat. “Movement was very important to us,” Simons said. “We desire movement; liberation of the body.” A lockdown-centric mentality, it wasn’t the only reminder of what we’re endured over the past year. Scattered throughout the collection, knitwear used as adornment on sleeves, collars and trims served as homespun remnants from our time spent wearing cardigans and sweaters in confinement.

The show was followed by a celebrity panel

Our collective post-traumatic lockdown disorder was echoed in wraps lined in dazzling sequins but held tightly together by hand, as if the models wanted to keep the insides to themselves. “It’s a gesture I’ve seen a lot in early Prada shows, a gesture of elegance but also of protection,” Simons explained. The show was followed by a digital panel of famous Prada fans and collaborators including Lee Daniels, Marc Jacobs and Hunter Schaffer talking about how much they loved the show. (Prada herself had fashioned a white 3M Covid-19 mask around her elbow, somehow making what’s become an everyday item look painfully cool.) Asked what “Prada-ness” means, Marc Jacobs simply answered: “Mrs Prada.” Amen to that.