Womanhood Reimagined at Prada
Backstage at Prada, reporters were having trouble with the signifiers.
Was that a bra, someone in the huddle asked Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons? “No bras,” Simons said firmly. “They’re not bras.” He was referring to the wispy tops in the designers’ spring 2026 show that had the trace of a bra’s outline but would decidedly let you down.
“Let’s just say they’re useless bras,” Prada said. That got a laugh in the press huddle.
Can you talk about the diapers a little, someone else asked. Simons didn’t want to talk about them at all. They’re bloomers, he said, and the brand has done them for years.
What about the aprons? “There are no aprons in this show,” Simons said, shaking his head. “Those are draped skirts.”
Prada was boggling us again. This sensation is what most of us live for, at least twice a year, and which few other brands deliver because they’re not as determinately free as Prada is. Prada, since the rise of Miuccia, in the late ’80s and especially in the ’90s, was born to disrupt, and to defend the belief that everything is mutable, including your underwear.
The great, disturbing aspect of this show, on Thursday in Milan, was how the designers challenged one’s perceptions of familiar feminine shapes and then proceeded to wring DIY logic out of them. Surely, in the girl universe, from Brooklyn to Tokyo, someone has whacked off a silk camisole or imagined a soft, loose-fitting skirt suspended from the shoulders and layered over something. Prada does it better, of course, and finds a way to connect the concept to the qualms and debates that attract designers.
“Sometimes fashion is perceived in a hierarchic way,” Simons noted. There’s “couture,” for example. And “luxury.” “We wanted to break out of that,” he said.
Virtually all the clothes are combinable. The wispy no-bras (to borrow a term from Rudi Gernreich) could be worn under a deep V-front cardigan, layered with a draped skirt, or worn alone with the skirt. Or add a soft, low-key blazer to the look. Those suspended skirts are cut from one piece of fabric. They’re soft and fluid, almost an afterthought to your outfit, yet they are the very element that gives it (and you) a strangeness, strange being the thing that separates fashion from clothes. “We did want to challenge ourselves with flue,” Simons said, meaning drapery.
Miuccia Prada hás always had a lot to say about skirts, just as Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has, and the skirts here were really the story. In addition to the so-called draped skirt, there was a wrap style composed of panels of different fabrics (or tones and textures) and a bubble design that gets its moderate volume from simply being doubled up, at an elasticated waist.
The wrap skirts were terrific, because, frankly, some the panels did suggest aprons. And I love that confusion. The cut of the skirts — which you step into and then wrap, adjusting as you like — was flattering.
What I especially liked about the collection — presented in the Prada Foundation’s vast, empty, concrete show space, on a glossy, pumpkin-spice-orange floor — was that it intelligently tackled current ideas, like lightness of fabrics and construction, and the mobility of people’s lives. It offered flexibility but not at the expense of your vanity and curiosity. So much of luxury fashion is stupidly heavy. It bricks you in. And Prada and Simons proposed an easy way out. In fact, I suspect their show will be the cold water to many overwrought collections we are likely to see during this season of debuts.
“People are obsessed with youth,” Silvia Venturini Fendi said moments before her show on Wednesday. “I’m not.” Fendi, who took over design for the house earlier this year, is confident in her own judgments, and it showed, again, in a distinctive collection. Fendi drew a bit of on the art and story of the French painter Marie Laurencin (1883–1956), who was part of Cubist circles. “She was one of the first to talk about sisterhood,” Fendi said. “And she often had groups of women in her paintings.” Men’s clothes were also in the show, but the point is that the cast attempted to reflect a diversity of ages and experiences.
The collection got much of its energy from sportswear, like tracksuits, a mini shirtdress in turquoise, and lovely, trim zip-front jackets with straight-line skirts, but the fabrics were often silk. The tracksuits were semi-sheer with shaved mink patches, and one short coat was woven from multihued strips of mink. Some of those vivid colors ran through the collection and were also part of the scenery (by Marc Newson). The white or black tabs on suits were elasticated pulls, for giving the jacket or skirt the shape the wearer wants. More waist, less waist.
Also inspiring was Fendi’s handling of pattern — mostly loopy daisies or more subtle geometric or dot prints. The daisies appeared as two cutouts on a slightly oversize navy shirt, as a virtual field on dresses, and as an exploded abstract version on a men’s white summer shirt. So Fendi had color, lightness, flexibility, and a taste for pleasure without decadence.
In a collection dubbed “Rococo Modern,” Max Mara played host to the spirit of Madame de Pompadour — a rather odd choice, you might think, for a no-frou-frou Italian company. The hair and makeup were subtly Pompadour, the muted prints apparently drew on Sevres porcelain (which the lady of the French court founded), and Max Mara’s usual good tailoring was punched up here and there with dense ruffles.
Oddly, it all worked. The elasticated black bands that appeared as straps for halter tops or a styling effect for a waistband or as an extra line just below a black knitted cropped top gave things a graphic sharpness. Take away the frills and black straps, and you get smart tailored clothes. My only complaint is that we were at sea in beige, gray and black. Surely, Madame de P had more fun than that.