SUPER PRADA SIMPLE PRADA
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons Blow Us Away
As new safety regulations continue to force designers into new realms of creativity, we get to see firsthand how they are all adapting to a new socially-distanced fashion landscape. While some designers have thrown out digital lookbooks (which is perfectly acceptable given the situation and new budget constraints), others dig deep to find new and exciting ways to engage their audiences. One such fashion house, Prada, can always be counted on to surprise us, and its Spring/Summer 2021 presentation was no exception.
This collection introduced two significant firsts for Prada. This collection marked the debut of Miuccia Prada’s highly anticipated collaboration with Raf Simons – fashion’s latest standard-bearer of modernism. Although Prada’s work has gone towards the voluptuous as of late, it’s the more austere side of Prada that made this collaboration successful. Rather than lament that the partnership had to debut digitally, Prada and Simons embraced this concept and focused on technology and humanity’s duality. No wonder the collection itself was titled “Dialogues.”
The set was designed by Rotterdam-based architectural think tank AMO/OMA, which has produced in-store technology for Prada stores in the past. The room was draped in an ivory-colored open curtain environment, which gave the feeling of old 1950s/1960s couture shows. An array of cameras and monitors hung from the ceiling, injecting a jarring (in a good way) sense of technology into an otherwise old-world presentation.
The monitors mentioned above were used to display each model’s name as she walked out, which brings us to the other Prada first: every model was making her very first runway appearance. It made the use of monitors emblazoned with their names, all that more refreshing. The show’s opener, platinum blond Dutch stunner Lydia Kloos, was celebrating her birthday the same day as the show, and what better way to do that than make your runway debut? She likened the camera experience and monitors moving around her to a science fiction film – entirely accurate, given the dystopian times we’re currently living in. The show’s closer, Vira Boshkova, was thankful to walk her first show with no live audience, which spared her nerves the stress of judgmental eyes.
Although this collection marked a new era of creative directorship for Prada, the new partnership between Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons proved to be a solid match. Simons has stayed true to Prada’s “uniform” while still injecting his sense of cool into the brand. We are excited to see what the pair will bring to future collections. With their apparent penchant for omnipresent cameras and monitors, we’ll be watching.
