Why Prada is the most cryptic house in fashion

Backstage at the Prada SS16 menswear show on Sunday night, Miuccia Prada told us she doesn’t like symbols because they simplify complicated thoughts and remove any doubt (of course, she’d filled her show with them just minutes earlier, from rabbits to rockets, cars, arrows and eyes because that’s how she rolls, tackling the icky head on). Her words felt like a header for her brand: a deeply complicated, complex and evasive creature that lives in and feeds off a space of doubt. 

The aftermath of a Prada show is always an amusing gaggle of people tentatively testing out their theories on the collection on each other as if they were about to sit an exam. We’re not just uncertain about what it all means, but often about whether we actually liked or disliked things, as Prada draws heavily on the power of the ‘ugly’, transforming it into something strangely desirable.  

This season, it was a dissonance of what Miuccia dubbed “post pop and post industrial” patterns and surfaces, where leatherette jackets were pushed up at the shoulders to sit awkwardly baggy at the back and Miu Miu-ish double-layered brown socks puddled at the ankles. Those vaguely constructivist patterns and striped sportswear/workwear silhouettes had an air of Soviet-era or Eastern Bloc about them – playing on Prada's fondness for a poor-rich reference, with lots of plain zips: “the most pure poor,” Miuccia said.

If last season’s severe black line-up seemed like a rebellion against everything being so loud and trend-led, Mrs Prada tackled that attention-hungry beast head on with her SS16 show, which seemed like a comment on modern life on a number of levels. These days, we constantly perform – both in the way we dress and how we come across on social media – and it was this idea of blatant advertising of self and brands that had crept into Prada's collection. 

After the show, she spoke of working around the idea of the post-modest, because modesty doesn’t really exist anymore. This was where those “stupid, infantile” symbols came from, like a mocking of obvious logo advertising and today’s need “to impress.” It was a dig at our spoon-fed brand culture, although obviously and ironically, come next season everyone will know where your rabbit jumper is from. 

“These days, we constantly perform – both in the way we dress and how we come across on social media – and it was this idea of blatant advertising of self and brands that had crept into Prada’s collection”

The blurry transparency of the set – massive angular and semi-circular shapes of clear polycarbonate and fibreglass, which the models appeared between – seemed to also echo the increasingly on-show but distorted lives we lead today. The problem with that life, as Miuccia noted, is that behind the necessity of constantly being boldly on display and communicating all these aggressive look-at-me images really quickly (rabbits, rockets, arrows – all pointing to speed), we’re all human.

This was where a crumpled, soft, homespun feeling crept into the collection, with visible stitching and lots of skin on show in short shorts. “More natural, normal,” were Prada's words, and it continued into the hair, which ran from afros to wavy curls, the antithesis of a bleached, straightened, plastic-y world. And because humanity encompasses men and women, the girls and boys were almost fifty-fifty on the runway.  

It's hard not to overthink Prada sometimes, because it can feel like such a luxury to have all these layered ideas thrown at you – like the concept of post-modesty and the notion of withdrawing from all the loudness in a loud rocket jumper. Only Prada could do a show of such contradiction and still have all those elements and meanings coexist in a way that works. But that niggling doubt about what it all means is always there, lurking beneath the surface of seemingly innocent things. That’s what makes it so intriguing.