Prada Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

The collection was entitled Let’s Talk About Clothes. Yet before we got to the garments, there was another substantial material reality to negotiate. This was the presence of Enhypen, the Korean seven-piece boy band, and their at-least 7,000 hard-screaming IRL fans who thronged the heavily fortified Fondazione Prada this afternoon. The band brought presents for Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons, and seemed charming. That fanbase was a force of nature whose enthusiasm raised the roof.

In truth the roof was rising already. The show was held in a Fondazione space pared back as never before, right down to its poured concrete bones. Above us was installed a sunken roof of plasterboard in the same sludgy tone, about a meter above our heads. During the show—and I confess I didn’t notice at the time—it slowly rose, until sinking again at the finale. “We changed what it did only last night,” said Raf Simons backstage before catching himself. “No, I won’t say it!”

Because what he and Mrs. Prada wanted to talk about was clothes. Of their recent dialogues, Raf Simons said: “we talk about how we want to work really hard to make clothes that can have a reality in this world, but which on the other hand still push it, which have a fashion point of view.” To achieve that they worked on a series of archetypal masculine garments in which they tried simultaneously to transmit both minimalism—or at least reduction—along with comfort and warmth. These two factors, he noted, if not quite oppositional are seen most certainly as uneasy bedfellows. The third factor, a pinch of Prada seasoning, sometimes echoed motifs from past seasons. This was the formula.

The first cluster of looks presented minutely-articulated variations—three-buttoned or two-, single-breasted or slightly doubled—in a kaleidoscope of charcoals. The cut was slim but floating, both to cut and physique. Instead of shirting the models wore detachable collars in various patterned fabrics, a motif that returned throughout the collection.

These crisp cottons were the same used for the pillowcases, with accompanying pillows, sent out along with the show invitations. They were there to echo as “a Prada gesture” the floating sailor collars we had seen in past house collections for both men and women. The jackets were suddenly replaced with two blazers in suede, before a cocoon-like top—prefigured by those pillows—that more resembled something to lay your head on than slip your body into. An equivalent piumino version of Prada’s vaunted vest followed directly. Two (collarless) engorged and pillowish MA-1 bombers in the classic orange-lined colorways were next. These were the first in what Simons called “the stereotypes” of outerwear, a series that included a parka, a donkey jacket, and a duffel coat. They were cut extra-long, like formal feminine evening dress, and then quickly repeated in radically foreshortened equivalents.

The collection continued its unfolding with a dialogue between color, texture, and form articulated through slim fit pants worn over colored cardigans and top coats shot through with retro-futuristic go-faster panels of contrasting and dynamic tones. The models carried totes, seemingly containing water bottles (and you’d think a lunchbox too) that were sometimes puckered in texture like cast-steel industrial flooring. At the end the white collar uniform of the introduction was supplanted by a modern version of a blue-collar equivalent; suede work aprons transformed into dresses, sometimes worn under topcoats. These pieces spoke—extremely succinctly—of several assumptions at once relating to work, class, and gender. It wasn’t only Simons who spoke tonight—Mrs. Prada was deep in conversation with the Italian press as he spoke to us. Arguably the most articulate protagonist in the room however was the collection they crafted together.