Prada’s new cool guy elegance

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jun 17, 2018

In sport there are tournament teams; and in fashion there are tournament designers, creators who nearly always turn up with winning ideas – each season. Individuals who just know when to take a new turn, or when a tactical or an artistic concept has run its steam.

Which is one of the many reasons Miuccia Prada remains a great designer. Just when everyone in Milan has been slavishly injecting athletic sports materials, cut and detailing; and coupling them with the graffiti hues of skateboarding, Miuccia calls a dramatic halt. Creating a cool, faintly techy, always strictly cut look for Prada in spring 2019, in which her youthful tousle-haired cast looked, quite simply, great.
 
“I hate the way that the millennials are reduced to being a commercial category. They are our young people, our new cool generation. Thinking of them as a business proposition is wrong,” stressed Prada over vodka and lime, and mini anchovy sandwiches, post show.

Slimly cut, flat-front pants; sleek suede dusters and blazers; and some great faintly powdery looking denim. FYI – neat denim is now officially cool again. Then a series of great woven stretch sneakers. Nothing at all too much, hip but carefully judged.
 
Most of the cast wearing padded nylon trapper hats in a collection in hues of tobacco, black, pink and then some marvelous prints.
 
“I’m after a new elegance. I sense in young people. They are fed up seeing street style and graphics and skate-boarding. Their fathers have all worn that for a while!” chuckled Miuccia.
 
Then she added the required psychedelic kick; dreamy print mixes of pouting gals with red lipstick; flowers in full blossom; acidic mountain tops and retro skyscrapers. Electric Ladyland for the 21st century in excellent clubbing looks.
 
This season, Miuccia returned the location of her show to historic Prada show-space at the Fondazione Prada. And, tournament team that Prada is, created a great new set – of large transparent, plastic box-shaped seats, from a design by Verner Panton never put into production. Backed up by a great soundtrack courtesy of France’s Frédéric Sanchez, opening with Windowlicker by Aphex Twin, and starring a brilliant new, fresh, self-confident cast, this was a quietly and cleverly stage-managed tour de force.
 
Bizarrely, the world’s greatest football tournament team Germany was losing its opening game in the World Cup to Mexico as this show took place. But then again nobody is perfect.