From wrinkled socks with sandals to big cotton knickers, Miuccia knows true eroticism is transgressive
Mrs. Prada may be the only person in fashion who is almost exclusively referred to on formal terms. It’s out of respect, obviously, given the 71-year-old has a matriarchal, if not monarchical, standing within the industry. But it’s also a deliberate marker of distance, the strategic decision of someone who has spent a career avoiding the banality of being understood, preferring to occupy that slippery space just outside of logic and conformity instead. It should be expected, really, from a designer who only entered fashion after joining the Italian Communist party, spending years as a mime and gaining a PhD in political science, first. A “Mrs”, at the hands of Prada, is an abstraction, an identity in flux, which gives space for the inconsistencies, liminality, and contradictions at the heart of her work.
From the moment Prada sent out an evening gown made of burlap (the same fabric used to make potato sacks) as part of its SS93 collection, the brand has built a legacy on being contradictory. “My true point of view is to go against the cliches of beauty and sexy… I want to be more clever, or more difficult, or more complicated,” Mrs. Prada told the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, in 2015. For nearly 40 years, the designer has lampooned against preconceived notions of good and bad taste: swinging between the old and new, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly. And when these dialectics transgress and contradict each other, there is an intangible jolt of eroticism. Clothing so wrong, they’re absolutely and totally right. It’s what contributes to that low, libidinous hum of a Prada collection.
Of course, the brand can be sexy in obvious ways, too. There are plenty of skimpy, revealing outfits in its back catalogue. But Mrs. Prada knows that true eroticism is transgressive, that “ugly is attractive, ugly is exciting”. Ahead of the label’s AW21 show, we rounded up some of the standout moments where the Italian powerhouse has made the ugly, sexy. Or should it be the sexy, ugly? Click through the gallery below.
The SS96 collection
Titled Banal Eccentricity, Prada’s SS96 show was a turning point in fashion history and it has since become synonymous with the brand’s ugly chic signature (which Mrs. Prada thinks is “a terrible phrase”, by the way). On the backs of Kate Moss and Amber Valletta, bogey greens and grotty browns came together in garish 70s wallpaper prints. Silhouettes were sent out limp and unflattering. Think frumpy skirts, trompe l’oeil tweed, and fugly T-bar sandals. It was a total counter aesthetic to the slick, stilettoed vision of sex pedalled by Gucci, Armani, and Versace in the mid-90s. And in doing so, this Prada collection introduced the world to the most subversive notion of luxury yet – one which didn’t have to be beautiful, let alone sexy.
Socks and heels
Somewhere between schoolgirl, 50s bobby-soxer, and sexy librarian, socks and heels have been a Prada standard ever since they first scuttled out onto the SS94 runway. Be it sheer-knee highs or precocious pop socks, there is always something suggestive in the way Prada awkwardly pulls its hosiery taught to the calf. It’s geek-chic akin to the much maligned socks and sandals. Yet fashion faux-pas come thick and fast at Prada and a subversion, or indulgence, of these taboos give a frisson of sexiness to Mrs. Prada’s world building. As a styling trope it riffs on the brand’s obsession with uniforms, in this case schoolgirl or the prissy bourgeoisie, which come loaded with a whole arena of associations.
Then, out of nowhere, came the wrinkly socks of Resort 2016, which were almost anaemic in how they drooped about the ankle. Sludgy brown and layered with another grey sock, they were devil may care in the way they had been peeled onto the foot, as if you hadn’t done a wash and now you were left with the socks that had lost their elastic. It’s a fetishising of the every day and the flatness of ordinary life, in a way that only Mrs. Prada can do.
Bourgeois Fetish
Although the entire AW08 menswear collection is a smorgasbord of transgression, perhaps one of Prada’s most raunchy forays into menswear was look number seven. Traversing a line between haughty business attire and rampant fetish, the offering edged the bourgeoisie (who are so often a target of Prada’s scrutiny) into the realm of kink.
The collection was graphic and heavy handed in its rendering of masculinity, subverting Prada’s usual proclivity for the abstract. Along with some exposed briefs (or was it a jockstrap?), this particular look took a clerical bib and styled it as though it had been fastened from the back like a bustier. It was “male vulnerability wrapped up in a shirt,” as critic Tim Blanks saw it, “as if traditional concepts of masculinity had been turned inside out.” Really, it gives repressed hedge-funder who secretly wears lingerie beneath his suit. And I’m sorry to say, but it’s also pretty reminiscent of this moment, too.
Men’s Hot Pants
“I’ve never used this word in my life... but now, it’s sexy,” said Mrs. Prada, addressing the press backstage at her SS19 menswear show. And sure enough, the collection throbbed with all the blasé of the swinging 60s, complete with kaleidoscopic, free-love prints, and tight little shorts. Of course, we had seen men in short-shorts before, namely SS16, but these were cheek chaffing hot pants in comparison. Or “mini skirts for men” as Prada put it (there she goes with her subversion, again).
It seemed Prada had finally made a long-awaited, unadulterated collection all about sex, but as the show culminated to the sound of Air’s “Sexy Boy”, it appeared the offering was a parody of sex, rather than anything truly lustful. After all, the top heavy, clownish silhouettes with exaggerated ushanka hats looked almost cartoonish as they flopped down the runway. And at times, the lurid shorts looked more like children’s swimwear than anything you’d want to actually thirst over. Once again, the very notion of sex had been Prada-fied, ensnaring us into its intellectual honeypot.
Y-Front knickers
Big M&S multi-pack bloomers: Prada truly cannot get enough. They cropped up in AW14 in a Tina Burner coloured, Bauhaus print. And then they reappeared for SS19 in plain white cotton. Both, however, were obscured behind gauzy come-hither slips. It’s that classic Prada dichotomy, this time between the naff and the seductive. Or the vulgar and the elegant. Those calculated clashes that rebuff cliché at every corner.
For Mrs. Prada, it’s an expression of duality, a longtime Prada obsession. SS19 was a comment on the far right and the neo-liberal left, while AW14 was an articulation of the tough and delicate edges of womanhood. By smushing the sexy and the ugly together, Prada is able to renegotiate life’s oppositions. And the contradictions that arise become the motor of reinvention – because Mrs. P knows nothing would change if life was simply harmonious.