Prada SS15 Menswear

Prada SS15

Initial reaction:

Utah boy goes to the big city, in embroidered top-stitched everything, brown leather-detailed denim and cashmere versions of charity shop knits. “It’s kind of conservative. Conservative looks more new,” Miuccia Prada said after the show in her trademark sphinx-like manner, noting that right now is not a moment for craziness or “useless inventions” but “something you want, something that’s real.” At a distance, the stitches that ran through most of the collection looked almost unreal – like (very accomplished) trompe-l’oeil DIY by a seventies kid who couldn’t afford the shit hot new denim his friends had so he drew some lines on a blue suit instead. On another level, the Swarovski stitches played on ideas of convention, asking us to rethink something as commonplace as the suit with its knife-pleated trousers. At Prada, normal somehow always becomes weird.

Pool irony:

We’ve become so used to being transported to a new space through Prada’s show productions in collaboration with AMO, but few people were probably expecting to walk into a stylised swimming pool area when we arrived at Prada this evening. Maybe the squidgy white invite should have tipped us off there was something pool buoy-y going on, but it didn’t. And that was probably a good thing as the massive white-pillared Yves Klein blue pool that greeted us had all the more impact. Surrounded on all sides by bleachers covered in dodgy golden-brown carpet (only Miuccia would pair that with a glittering pool) that extended to a raised runway on the water, it was a Miuccia-style take on an old summertime chestnut. “It was a joke on what’s classic,” she commented after the show.

Subverting the classics:

“I interpreted the classics. It means everything and nothing. It means what looks good for me,” Miuccia laughed backstage, explaining that menswear is a sphere where she can do what she likes most, unlike womenswear where “we always have to push, push, push.” In many ways, it did feel like well-known Prada territory – like the seventies ugly-chic suits and the elevated special needs footwear – but in Prada’s universe, the idea of house classics will never be just that, even if you can’t always quite put your finger on what makes them so strangely alluring and unfamiliar. This season, it might have been the subdued rhinestone cowboy mood that added to it. And like last season, a couple of girls also made their way down the runway, this time in matching blinged-up dresses with an optical pleat effect, but Miuccia Prada stressed it wasn’t resort. “I don’t call it resort because that’s mid-level. It’s a collection.”

The soundtrack to Prada SS15: