Prada: Fall-Winter 2011-12.

Prada:  Fall-Winter 2011-12

 

[ photo:  via style.com ]

[ models:  Maricarla Boscono, Ginta Lapina ]

If one thing is true of Milan’s untrammeled sorceress Miuccia Prada, it is that her creative direction is often steeped in cache—messages shrouded in reverse (and perverse) meanings, contradicted and concealed in her unique mind-game approach to creating a garment.  That is until the debut of the Fall-Winter 2011-12 collection two days ago in Milan, where Miuccia laid anarchic siege upon her usual love affair with incongruencies and paradox and in a freshly undemanding fashion, delivered a surprisingly lucid show statement.  At first glance, the mock mod-era wool gabardine suiting appeared unremarkably rehashed, especially when paired with a shag-coat in enamel beige and plasticized paneling.  It sits on the body with the serious rigidity of a grammar-school uniform and the boxy cut even made the lithe Mariacarla appear stiff and unsettled.  But the approachability of Milanese sportif outerwear was just the entity manipulated by Miuccia in this case to make an unassuming school-girl uniform second as a practical wardrobe piece.  Miuccia’s straightforwardness is quite the unearthing, but the aesthetic itself is hardly new.  She did this back at her Fall-Winter 2007-08 collection, when in a similarly short silhouette, Miuccia bridged the techno-ski aesthetic to an unsexy (though quite scheming) version of the 1990’s Prada-woman.  That collection’s strange ghost seemed to waft throughout next Fall’s show look after look.  But it wasn’t Miuccia’s focus to recapture the already visited zeitgeist of 90’s minimalism (when has she ever demonstrated a full exercise in reduction?).  Following in the vein of this industry’s unapologetic obsession with animalier, Miuccia’s snakeskin printed coats were not exactly marketed in body-conscious form.  They have squared shoulders and the sleeves sit an inch (or more, it appeared) away from the wrist—every indication that she wanted to challenge our spirit of womanly dressing and make it as if a girl was trying on her father’s overcoat—in a word, innocent.  Prada is re-imagining its girlish ease and is to be commended for shortchanging her need for disorienting sartorial repartee for a grasp on consistency and well-structured rationality.  If last season it was a moment to be a bold, graphic Josephine Baker caricature, next autumn is the time to return to incorruptibility. 

- Matthew Callahan