Slime has never looked so good as it did oozing down onto the Prada runway Thursday afternoon in Milan.
Design duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons outdid themselves with their wonderfully weird spring 2024 women’s collection, which included some of the most gorgeous dresses to come down a runway in awhile — shifts in pale blue, green, or pink silk gazar trailing layers of superfine organza like vapor behind them.
The designers challenged themselves to do a collection about lightness and flou, and “movement of material you can’t grasp as solid,” said Simons backstage, highlighting the georgette fabric fragments, fringe and embroidery throughout, not to mention the reason for bringing back the slime from the men’s show set in June, which rained down curtains of pale pink clear goo onto the runway.
Surprisingly, it didn’t detract from the top notch collection, which clashed materials and genres with true creativity.
Many Prada fans will rejoice in the return to decoration this season. Fringed flapper dresses and the brand’s iconic cardigan sweaters embellished with abstracted sprays of crystals and silver eyelets looked fabulous without being too retro, speaking instead to the futuristic industrial-meets-feminine vibe that ran throughout. The ultimate extras were printed fringe shirts, and fringe belts resembling jewelry, worn alone as skirts or over short shorts.
For an element of rugged street cool, they layered in workwear, including beat-up leather cargo vests and jackets that could be haute cousins of Carhartt.
The tailoring should also resonate with the Gen Z and younger set, including masculine, structured-shoulder blazers as light as cotton poplin shirting tucked into belted high-waisted short shorts or pleated pants, and worn with stompy shoes.
The designers deftly mixed materials both raw and refined, from leather to organza, crystals to hardware. They crisscrossed the decades with 1920s, 1930s, 1980s and 1990s references, and the generations, nodding to brand patriarch Mario Prada by reviving a bag he designed in 1913 with a “mythological face” for an ornamental clasp.
“He sliced cultures together and that’s what we are about. We thought it was a good moment to go back to the intensions of the family,” Simons said.
“He was very eccentric,” Prada added of her grandfather, who sourced English silver, Austrian crystal, Asian silks and leathers, brought them back to Italy and had them assembled into composite objects, including vanity cases, calendars and little bags sold at his travel shop.
And so the brand continues to be inventive today, always giving us something just beyond our grasp, in this case a gooey delight.
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