24 Sep 2022
The Prada Spring/Summer 2023 women’s collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presents a sequence of realities - reflections, refractions, observations. Acts of reality.
There is an interrelationship between the raw and the sensual, between delicacy and roughness, an emulsification of contrasts. The collection plays constantly with dissimilitude and paradox, shifting between different visions, separate realities. Mirroring the décor of the show space - a black paper panopticon, itself a sublimation of a domestic sphere, a reality – a paper-based fabric is used for a series of dresses, torn against the body, intimate and impulsive. Human gestures animate surfaces - traces of life shape the forms of garments, intentional rifts, twists, creases and folds capture a spontaneity, like memories of beauty embedded in cloth. Acts of refinement are energised with a sense of the accidental, representative of creative freedom, gestures of liberation.
Reality translates to humanity. It is reflected through a sense of the hand, a touch of the crude, a rawness that evokes a fragility. Day and evening clothes cross-pollinate, the signs and signifiers of each shifting - opera coats fuse with leather jackets, tailoring borrows trains of fabric. Clothes for the intimacy of the home in delicate pastel tones fuse with outerwear, a blurring of distinct realities, while a notion of Prada uniform, in bodysuits of poplin shirting in industrial colors, denotes a minimalized reality. Accessories propose an antique nappa, surfaces patinated, pressed and wrinkled, used to reinterpret archetypal and classic Prada handbag silhouettes. Polarities are explored between minimalism and decoration, occasion and everyday - as in life, in reality, unanticipated dichotomies are observed, explored, embraced.
For the Spring/Summer 2023 women’s runway show, Prada invites the viewpoint of film director Nicolas Winding Refn to conceive an experience around the collection. Entailing an immersive installation and the runway show’s physical environs in collaboration with AMO, it is an opportunity for observation and intersection between two creative spheres, an expansion. At the center of the creative exchange sit a series of short films by NWR, exploring the lives of women, the scope of fluid modern femininity - a subject matter that has always fascinated Prada. These films are presented physically to the audience within the installation at the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada. Through raw apertures punched through the décor, fragments of NWR’s shorts may be observed, the audience inside afforded the opportunity to look out, to more realities.
