Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons served up something a little more low-key chic for Prada’s Spring/Summer 2023 womenswear collection, but before the show even started it was all about Prada’s new $1,000 tank top as seen on Manu Ríos, known for his role as Patrick Blanco Commerford on the Netflix series Elite.
The minimal all-black paper set designed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn is set as this collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a sequence of realities – reflections, refractions, and observations. Acts of reality.
Manu Ríos
There is an interrelationship between the raw and the sensual, between delicacy and roughness, and emulsification of contrasts. The collection plays constantly with dissimilitude and paradox, shifting between different visions, and separate realities. Mirroring the décor of the show space – a black paper panopticon, itself a sublimation of a domestic sphere, a reality – a paper-based fabric is used for a series of dresses, torn against the body, intimate and impulsive.
Human gestures animate surfaces – traces of life shape the forms of garments, intentional rifts, twists, creases, and folds capture a spontaneity, like memories of beauty embedded in the cloth. Acts of refinement are energized with a sense of the accidental, representative of creative freedom, and gestures of liberation.
Reality translates to humanity. It is reflected through a sense of the hand, a touch of the crude, a rawness that evokes a fragility. Day and evening clothes cross-pollinate, the signs and signifiers of each shifting – opera coats fuse with leather jackets, tailoring borrows trains of fabric. Clothes for the intimacy of the home in delicate pastel tones fuse with outerwear, a blurring of distinct realities, while a notion of Prada uniform, in bodysuits of poplin shirting in industrial colors, denotes a minimalized reality.
Accessories propose an antique nappa, surfaces patinated, pressed, and wrinkled, used to reinterpret archetypal and classic Prada handbag silhouettes. Polarities are explored between minimalism and decoration, occasion and every day – as in life, in reality, unanticipated dichotomies are observed, explored, and embraced.
