“Glamour.” That was the word Miuccia Prada kept intoning alongside Raf Simons backstage at their Autumn/Winter 2025 womenswear show. It’s not, perhaps, a word you would automatically associate with Prada – although Mrs Prada herself is very glamorous (today, for example, backstage, she wore a fabulous archival grey wool cape embroidered with a black caviar of beads). Rather, the style she has forged, that is synonymous with her brand name and enormously influential to designers across the world – including, by his own frequent admission, Simons – has been based on upending our clichés of glamour. Think of the nylon backpack, and the use of that industrial fabric generally as a new, subversive totem of deluxe. It’s grit, rather than glamour.
Oddly enough, glamour was something I spoke with Mrs Prada about when we first met about ten years ago. “A part – the more conservative part – of the fashion world think that they’ll stick with the idea of glamour and beauty that is so obvious, so old,” she said. She didn’t consider that a good thing then, and she doesn’t now. Neither, actually, does Simons: remember in Dior and I, when Simons rallied against the idea of a shoe that a woman wouldn’t be able to walk in? “Within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there is lots of restriction of the body,” Simons commented before this Prada show. “Here, it is free.”
So, eschewing evening gowns and preciousness, what is Prada glamour? It’s open for discussion – and, indeed, it’s also exactly the kind of questions Prada wanted to propose with this show, rather than answer. “We are interested more in those questions, in using them to open new discussions,” said Miuccia Prada. “We asked ourselves – what is feminine? What is feminine beauty? What is femininity today?” It’s a deep concept. This collection did offer answers, but was decidedly open-ended – femininity today could be in a little black dress, or indeed a big black dress, or a red one draped and layered over jeans. Dresses, generally, were key pieces – they were chopped up to form skirts or tops, fragments migrating around the body to discover new functions. But equally, there were savage shearling coats, and raw-edged hardy boiled looking wools wearing their ragged seams like scars of conflict. “Very, very difficult to construct,” Mrs Prada demurred.
Here, glamour doesn’t look like it would anywhere else. There were jewels, and fur stoles, and luxurious handbags and high heels, alongside bombshell dresses with bombastic curves – all the raiments of a timeless glamour, but exploded and used unconventionally. Rescaling those dresses, for instance, completely transformed their meaning – rather than the form-gripping restriction Simons talked about, oversized shapes easily moved around the body in motion, their pointed breasts empty, flowing against the form. There was not a corset in sight – although there were clingy knits that hinted at sensuality, and at some point dresses began to be dissected, top and bottoms chopped off raw to leave a little black bandeau dress spanning the torso. “Total liberation,” said Simons.
Ideas of femininity can so easily be trite and stereotypical – as Prada said, we return again and again to archetypical, age-old and old-age ideals. And, in the throes of award season, we see them played out ad infinitum – precarious heels, bias-cut gowns and cumbersome trails, a static vision of woman preserved from a past that no longer exists. It’s not just about those ideas making a pretty picture now, though. There are plenty of cultural and socioeconomic factors roiling globally, and the results seem to be throwing back progress – around universal rights, but particularly women’s – some 70 years. So now is a poignant and important moment to ask what femininity can mean, and should mean. For Prada and Simons, it wasn’t shy and retiring. The women peopling this powerful, meaningful and intellect-led show seemed geared up to fight. And that may be what we all need to do.
