Just another day in the office. We filed into the Fondazione Prada at the end of lunch hour. Immediately inside the doors was a warren of gray-carpeted work cubicles, all immaculately tidy in adherence with company policy. Prada screensavers gleamed softly under industrial lighting. Those keen to mark their return paused to photograph themselves. Around the corner into the main workspace, heads down, and: wow!
This set for this season’s Prada menswear (and presumably for the womenswear to come, too) consisted of a raised glass floor supported by iron struts just over three feet high. Beneath us was what appeared to be a stream running through a meadow. Water pumped forth from beneath the runway entrance, then meandered onwards over river stones, idly pushing autumn leaves down its course. There were patches of grass and reed. The initial surprise was considerable. Above the glass, however, behavior swiftly returned to normal working protocols. The runway also meandered, its path defined by a line of tightly packed office swivel chairs. Its course became quickly clogged by crowds keen to secure content featuring Metawin Opas-iamkajorn, Karina, Lee Jae-wook and other guests. Once the course eventually cleared, the real shift began.
Said Mrs. Prada backstage: “In this moment you can’t avoid talking about subjects that are relevant. For instance, nature.” As she and Raf Simons jointly explained, the thinking behind the collection was intimately entangled with the notion of our natural environment—how we are insulated from it, and how to go back to it. Added Simons: “Most people’s screensavers are nature but then at the end we sit in this very synthetic human made environment.”
The collection included wearable working environments for multiple manners of man: Simons listed “the businessman, the working man, the thinking man.” Most wore ties. The Prada twist was touches that subverted these safe spaces of identity, enticing the wearer to dive into the elemental, to surround himself with nature. Textured swimming caps (a perennial Prada classic) were teamed with goggle-like spectacles with side panels and leather sandals. Narrow-fit raincoats, tweed chore jackets (a new-fabric adaption, carried over from last season), three-button gray topcoats, and gold buttoned naval outerwear (in cracked leather or navy nylon) all offered a route outdoors. Belts in triangular sections of leather were sometimes affixed with equipment packs; larger nylon totes were webbed with smaller equivalents in leather.
The second besuited commuter wore leather slippers, the same footwear Simons mentioned that he tends to wear when walking his dog first thing in the morning: “In these moments I really think in a different way about nature.” He also mentioned the Elfstedentocht, a Dutch cultural celebration (and ice skating race) that is only possible when certain rivers freeze in winter. You suspected a critique of broader human denial—man’s Canute insistence on continuing “normal” patterns of behavior despite the waters rising to drown him—but both designers remained circumspect. “Probably there is something that is about the weather,” conceded Mrs. Prada: “Absolutely.”
Of that amazing set, Mrs. Prada was less non-committal: “It was menacing. For me it was scary. That was the impression I had the first time I saw it. What is scary is the nature that you can’t touch through the glass.” Just before the show began, however, I spotted a spider on a seat alongside me: it had worked its way through.