At Prada there is an interrelationship between the raw and the sensual, and between delicacy and roughness. This embodied itself in a collection that played constantly with dissimilitude and paradox, shifting between different visions and separate realities. The show space itself was a panopticon constructed out of black paper. Stirring up questions about the constant debate about surveillance and data collection in our technological era, the paper panopticon is Prada’s take on reality. In a mirror image of this a paper-based fabric was used for a series of dresses, torn against the body, in an intimate and impulsive act. 

Entitled “Touch of Crude” the collection evoked a touch of rawness that suggested fragility. Fragility of our modern reality perhaps? This translated into intentional rifts, twists, creases and folds capture a spontaneity, like memories of beauty embedded in cloth.

Day and evening clothes cross-pollinated, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, co-artistic directors at Prada, expertly presented a sequence of realities – reflections, refractions, observations. Their harmonic approach to fashion and design resulted in a challenge to our usual perception of day and night wear and they delicately twisted and deformed the signs and signifiers of each  – opera coats fuse with leather jackets, tailoring borrows trains of fabric. Clothes for the intimacy of the home came in delicate pastel tones fused with outerwear. Bodysuits came in poplin shirting in industrial colors, denoting a minimalized reality. Accessories proposed an antique nappa, patinated surfaces, pressed and wrinkled, used to reinterpret archetypal and classic Prada handbag silhouettes. 

For the show itself, Prada invited film director Nicolas Winding Refn to conceive an experience around the collection. Entailing an immersive installation and the runway show’s physical environs in collaboration with AMO, he took it as an opportunity for observation and intersection between two creative spheres. He produced a series of short films by NWR, which explored the lives of women, and the scope of fluid modern femininity – a subject matter that has always fascinated Prada. These films were presented physically to the audience within the installation at the Depositor of the Fondazione Prada. Through raw apertures punched through the décor, fragments of NWR’s shorts could be observed, the audience inside afforded the opportunity to look out, to more realities.

Check out the conversation between Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons and Nicolas Winding Refn and Discover the looks below. 

And more at prada.com