Miuccia and Raf dropped a pill and now we don’t know what’s real at Prada

Have ever you arrived late to a house party and it’s so packed you practically have to queue to get inside? Well, that’s how guests at Prada’s SS25 men’s show just felt. When attendees walked into the dark Milan show space to the sound of thudding techno, it was soon revealed that the music was coming from a little house tucked in the corner, and their seats were actually following a winding driveway that led up to it. And if the Instagram teaser that dropped days earlier was anything to go by, we were in for a rave smack bang in the middle of Milan Fashion Week.

Rather than being prim, proper and genteel, all hints were pointing to the fact that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons had been spending the last couple of weekends letting rip in the club, and this latest collection was the spoils of their hedonism. Just before the show was due to start, Prada posted the little white house on its Instagram page, with the same thudding music and blue strobes emanating from it, along with the very cryptic phrase “the power of reality, in a world of the imaginary.” So, if the collection was about house parties, raving, and a dialogue between the real and imaginary, that can only mean one thing: Miuccia and Raf double dropped at the weekend and now they don’t know what’s real.

While this is of course conjecture, the collection that followed hinted at the hazy illusions that Class As can bring about. The show began with models in huge visor sunglasses that swamped their faces (and conveniently covered their pupils). While it looked like the sunnies were just made of silver reflective material, on closer inspection there were also houses, TVs and random objects appliquéd onto the lenses, making it hard to differentiate between the real life reflection of the runway and the hallucinations floating on the frames. Elsewhere, other illusions appeared as trompe-l’oeil belts that were painted onto trousers, while tops that looked like shirts-under-jumpers were actually one-piece intarsia knits.

At other points in the show, the boiler suit made several appearances, but this time re-upped with colourful zips that traced both legs and up to the neck. As a staple of mid-90s rave culture, its inclusion in this collection made a lot of sense, especially as the thumping techno rang through the space. We suspect that these kinds of rave references are the handiwork of one particular half of this design duo, namely Mr Raf Simons. To say that Raf is inspired by club culture would be a huge understatement: raving has practically formed the bedrock of his design language, and we’ve seem him seamlessly weave youth culture into his collections since his debut. Take his endlessly referenced AW01 Riot! Riot! Riot! show for example, or more recent iterations like SS23’s Printworks rave, or a SS16 collection inspired by Mark Leckey’s cult 1999 rave documentary Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. And while the references are maybe a little bit more pared back for Prada, one thing that’s for certain is we’re always gonna bump into Raf at the rave.