Milan Fashion Week has started and spring is on the shows. The first big highlight was the Prada show, so Zeitgeist must be!
Even the security staff likes to watch, as here at a side entrance to the Fondazione Prada.
The seasons in Milan are different from ours: autumn can also be spring and vice versa. This is due to Fashion Week, which presents next season’s fashion four times a year and turns half the city upside down. The historic streets are even more colorful and noisy, and also a lot fancier.
Where the important shows take place, the hustle and bustle is particularly great. Like around the Fondazione Prada. The complex and museum is Prada’s Milan art quarters, where the luxury brand showed the new spring collection for women on Thursday. Since the opening of the area renovated by Rem Koolhaas in 2018, the big Prada shows have been held in the Fondazione. Then so many people gather at the entrance that barriers have to be set up so that the invited guests can still get through to the entrance. The spectators are mainly waiting for stars who are driven up in limousines. The bigger the shouting, the better known the star is on social media.
Photos and fun: The mood at the entrance is exuberant. Sabine Roethig
But the Prada shows don’t just attract onlookers. They are also always a reason for young Italians to dress up in order to attract the attention of the street style photographers, who also flock here in large numbers. And if that doesn’t work, you just photograph each other for your own Instagram account. Also beautiful.
Battle fairies and pretty librarians
Those who were lucky enough to be among the invited guests found themselves in a house made of black paper. The men’s spring collection was shown a few months ago in a white house installation; it was now getting dark for the women. And twice as full as it seemed. Milan Fashion Week is in full swing again. Installations by ‘Drive’ director Nicolas Winding Refn dot the set. Finally, the fairytale-like music by Cliff Martinez reinforces the enraptured mood, which, despite its blackness, does not feel threatening.
The new Prada collection: Business basics made of transparent materials create a whole new type of nude look. Prada
And the collection? Sensational! Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons once again proved their mastery of the art of merging paradoxes: a train on a blazer, for example. However, this is cut so that it only reaches the calf. Already a must-have for next year and easy to wear, the trains in the previous women’s collection still hung on super-short minis and touched the floor. The shoes, fusions of boots and pumps, with which the fighting fairies and pretty librarians trudged down the runway, also testify to this ingenious art of fusion. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have thus once again added to the Prada universe looks in which intellectuality and everyday fashion meet in designs that are anything but unworldly. Even if they stimulate the imagination extremely.
The Prada SS23 Womenswear Collection video is available here and a conversation between Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons and Nicolas Winding Refn about the Fondazione Prada installation is here.
There are more videos and pictures from the big wide world of fashion at @berliner_zeitung_style