Fashion is a means of translating a reaction to reality into material form. It is not only a reaction to the world around us, but ultimately designed to sit within in, to become part of an actuality it in turn reflects. The Miu Miu Spring/Summer 2023collection by Miuccia Prada underscores and explores this idea, of a transferral of feeling and response into result.
Fashion itself is part of real life – it has a use a purpose, both to dress the body and toexpress broader feelings, larger themes, around the individual and culture. The notion of usefulness, of fashion’s benefit and service, influences physical expression: pockets, an expression of utility are used across different garments, transgressing boundaries between decoration and function.
Complexity is expressed through layering of cottons, silks and cashmeres in deliberately subtle colour, or nylon tricot in sharper hues. Their interplay creates surface texture, a form of decoration evoked through the garments themselves as opposed to extraneous application. In a continuum of the previous two seasons, echoes of classic garments – tailored jackets, coats, shirts, sweaters – are re-proposed, reiterated. Here, unexpected fabrications can disrupt their reality, executed in leather or washed denim.
The use of fashion is not only physical but psychological – it effects emotion, elevates. Embroidery and colour serve purpose to translate these aims of emotional impact; elsewhere, surface animation is created through garments, graphic bands of underwear, shoes carved out to expose skin, in decoration as a form of an anti-ostentation.
