An assertion of the primacy of clothes. The Fall/Winter 2023 Prada menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons is a further exploration of the fundamentals of fashion. It champions its continuing meaning, value and significance today.
Modernist precepts of reduction and simplicity combine with their apparent contradictions: comfort, exaggeration, an intimacy. Paradigms of fashion combined with paradigms of Prada, literal and ideological fragments of heritage inherited by new garments. Reductionist tailoring, graphic shards of print and knit, laid on bared skin.
Extraneous details are shorn from garments that wrap the form in a tactile exchange, against a naked body. Silhouettes are emphatic, amplified and attenuated, exploring extreme vicissitude between couture volumes through the architecture of the clothes.
Proportion can transform perception. The show space of the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada – conceived by AMO – exposes the concrete shell of the building. Within this stripped, raw panorama, dimensions are re-engineered, radically altered – a ceiling rises slowly to transmute the space from intimate to grand, altered scale in turn shifting our perspective on the clothing within. This process echoes the garments themselves, elongated or abbreviated. They demonstrate a reconstruction of meaning, of identity, activated through a minimal gesture.
