Miuccia Prada's latest Miu Miu show had a knife-to-the-throat intensity, leaving you reeling with unease, the same feeling you get after watching an episode of “Black Mirror.”
It will also make many women fall in love all over again with LBDs, party suits, pearl necklaces, leather jackets (albeit shearling), and pencil skirts. They were all idealized (or cleverly deformed) and mixed together in that inimitable, impertinent Miu Miu way.
“Black Mirror” has dedicated episodes to memory (the fallibles of humans versus the impeccable storage capacity of machinery) and here Prada adopted a variety of clothing archetypes from different stages of life: the prim Peter-collar coats Bread of childhood; uniforms and scrubs for work, and moments of celebration with a Warhol-style floral pouf skirt or a suede jacket adorned with crystal brooches.
Its cast also offered variety, from Gigi Hadid to actresses Kristin Scott Thomas and Angela Molina, both in their sixties.
“Classic items for every moment, and you can choose the boy, you can choose the lady,” the designer told reporters after her show. “I show possibilities (of course, fashion possibilities that I think are relevant now) and you can definitely choose.
“Every morning I have to decide if I am a 15-year-old girl or a woman on the verge of death,” she said matter-of-factly, letting out a small laugh.
A haunting, futuristic film by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans played on a loop before the show, showing a translator painting her nails and drinking from her enormous Stanley water bottle, bored to the bone. When she finally gets to work transcribing a memory transmission in a lost language, her eyes light up, but she then suffers her own memory loss, represented digitally, like spores emerging from a fungus.
Prada has that knack for making the familiar fabulous: adding some padding to a beige Mac or a Barbour-esque jacket; shrinking knit peacoats until they barely reach above the ribcage and extending men's deerskin gloves to the elbow. The colors of the Maytag repairman and the hotel's leather slippers threw everything off balance a little.
Prada said she chose “typical” things for a reason. “For me, classic is what never goes out of style because it has meaning,” she reflected.
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