For Spring/Summer 2024, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons stripped it right back. Not in terms of the clothes – this collection was, perhaps, the richest and most elaborate they have produced yet in their design partnership, three years long at this juncture. Rather, it was stripped bare in terms of the message. There was no overarching narrative, no complex imbued meaning. “The clothes say everything,” stated Prada herself, with striking simplicity.
But, of course, that was a loaded statement in and of itself. What these clothes talked about was, to varying degrees, a dynamic movement and fluidity in silhouette, alongside a reiteration of the value of work. Specifically, that related to the importance of craft and the physicality of the hand in making. “Although we usually don’t, for this season we wanted to talk about the craftsmanship – the complexity of work in these clothes,” said Simons. “All the embroideries are by hand, and throughout there are ideas and techniques we have studied and developed over a long period. This work is always part of what we do, have always done.” That said, now is a prescient moment for celebration: at a time when AI expansion has lead to questions around the need for human minds, let alone hands, behind creation (it’s one part of the impetus behind the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike, after all), such a statement felt significant. “Returning to the concrete, physicality and actuality,” emphasised Prada.
Forget the ephemeral and virtual: there was a tangible sense of human ingenuity everywhere here – both in terms of the expertise needed to craft clothes like these, and the minds required to imagine them in the first place. There was a fitting reflection found in the collection’s unconventional keynote accessory, a handbag pulled from the archive, originally created around 1913 by Miuccia Prada’s grandfather Mario Prada. Originally in silk moiré (reiterated in nylon or leather), it was an elegant little bag topped with a carved clasp in the form of an enraged head, grimacing at the world. Mario Prada travelled the world to find oddities and curiosities like that, engaging craftspeople to combine them into one-off pieces he called oggetti di lusso – or objects of luxury. In a similar way, this collection seemed to search out different notions to fuse together: ‘fragments’ of dresses were swathed over sharp tailoring, gestures of the feminine softening masculine lines, while delicate vintage-style embroideries of crystal strass and chains were worked, by hand, over tough leathers. As Simons said, “recognised ideas, techniques and materials are used differently, approached in uncommon ways.”
You could also ally the collection’s dynamism to work – it emphasised a freedom of the body, which allows you to get on with business. Fringe swung, superlight organza dresses flowed, the tailoring was as fluid as the films of slime that dropped from the ceiling to veil the collection. Although, obviously, all those elements were also the result of work – chain skirts were made like pieces of fine jewellery, tailoring was ingeniously constructed without any of the traditional interfacing and stiffening used to create such emphatic shapes, and Simons said a Japanese organza, used for the dresses they called ‘Haze’ because of the filmy effect they created around, rather than on, the body, had been years in development. The results – as with the rest of this collection – were worth the wait.
And that leads to another simple and direct aim of this collection, as stated bluntly by Prada herself. “We tried to make the best out of our work, to make beautiful things, for today,” she said. Then shrugged. “That may sound banal, but it is the truth.”