Fashion is stereotyped to be a mirror of its time. So how exactly to reflect the moment in which we live, fractured and disjointed and increasingly shaped by digital interventions that remove the possibility of chance and spontaneity. That was the big idea – and it was a big idea – behind Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ Spring/Summer 2025 Prada show, possibly the first inspired by the dictatorial influence of 21st-century algorithms.
In layman’s terms, as used on social media and the like, algorithms apply logic to the illogical, attempting to predict what we want before we even realise, shaped by what we have already interacted with, liked, devoured. It’s a regurgitation of pre-consumed information – and, in many cases, it is successful. We do want to see endless reiterations of those cat memes – but, on a more insidious level, do we only want to see a predetermined slant on world events, engineered to our tastes and cultural biases? Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, who has stated that the storied institution is staging a ‘Year of AI’ across 2024 and 2025, has nevertheless questioned “How to escape the prison of one’s own filter bubble.”
The Prada collection was an answer. In fact, scratch that, it was a conversation. “We wanted not to critique but to engage with this idea, to open a dialogue inspired by our cultural moment,” said Miuccia Prada. “We examine its core meaning and find our own reactions.” Namely, rather than ripping apart the reality of today, Prada and Simons reflected it, proposing looks that could be alternatives given that fashion usually looks simultaneously backwards and forwards – using fragments from a half-remembered past to invent a future – this was a Prada collection rooted in the now, in both its theories and execution.
Miuccia Prada also talked about the feel of real people dressing mixing eras without hierarchy, while Raf Simons posited that the clothes could make people into superheroes, focused on authority and personal strength. There were some direct nods to that idea – slick, clinging knit bodysuits and mask-like sunglasses that clearly winked at Marvel’s finest. Otherwise, the collection roamed wide. Simons told me that the collection had 45 different shoe lasts, whereas most collections focus on two or three specific styles.
Each outfit was adapted, like couture, to reflect the individuality of its wearer; it was then also carefully considered in the sequence of exits, one look followed by its apparent contradiction, to jolt, confuse and ultimately delight. Unlike most fashion shows, we as the audience had genuinely no idea what would be coming around the satin-draped bend on the next figure. Every outfit was a surprise. Indeed, they were so varied that it’s futile to try to describe them - after all, if you single out one outfit for merit, there’s 48 others, equally singular, that deserve the same attention.
That said, there was what they described as a “plurality of Prada” at play, elements pulled from the house’s archives distant and near and reimagined – magnified, exaggerated, inverted. The eyelets of last spring became vast windows sliced into mirrored leather skirts, perhaps printed with images that featured on the lens of sunglasses in their last men’s show, but which also recalled the surreal beach prints from their Spring/Summer 2010 collection. A silk coat in a rich, specific shades of violet and demure pussy-bowed blouses were milestones from the 2000 ‘Sincere Chic’ collection; the trompe l’oeil furs were signature. And those 45 shoe lasts were basically a timeline of Prada in footwear, a retifist’s wet dream.
So yes, the past was present but it was reconsidered, combined in confrontational and arresting – even brutal – fashions, as if juxtaposed in a truly random image search. Algorithms could never. A question jumped up at me: was this Prada Spring/Summer 2025 show a fashion show? Well, yes and no. Of course, it showed fashion – Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are into hardcore fashion, into pieces that shift our collective consciousness to something new. But in terms of fashion reflecting a singular look, a mode of dressing or trend – that idea went out the window. And that felt different. In a world where predictions become predictable, this was a fashion show that could not be second-guessed. “The idea of choice,” said Miuccia Prada. “Of unpredictability as a measure of human creativity.”