If designers are known for the garment that casts their most prolific influence, Alber Elbaz’s is the cocktail dress, Phoebe Philo’s is the perfect trouser, and Mrs. Prada’s legacy hinges on the skirt. The Italian designer wears a strict uniform of a crewneck knit and either a full or straight skirt that falls somewhere between her shin and her knee. It is a look that has also informed her brand’s design language and spawned countless imitators.
Put simply, the skirt is her thing. There are entire social media accounts — @whatmiuccia and @miucciafinale to name two — dedicated solely to chronicling just that. This season, she and co-creative director Raf Simons meditated on that emblematic garment. “We were fascinated by the way Prada skirts, not alone but in particular, stand the test of time,” Simons wrote in the show notes. “Their eccentricity, their form, their decoration — there is something lasting in their design language.” Every single look, and there were 63 of them, featured a skirt. Some were short, some were long; some elaborate and embellished, some simple.
The first look featured a red wrap skirt adhered with a giant strip of black Velcro and paired with a little bra top. The second model wore a turtleneck sweater and chartreuse skirt parted at the sides to reveal a slip beneath. And so it continued with the designers warping, manipulating, and perfecting Mrs. Prada’s uniform.
Midway through came slip skirts with ribbon detailing tucked into a see-through chiffon casing. Leather skirt suits followed with dyed colorful facades. There were boxy pleated gray skirts with contrasting strips of colorful Velcro sprinkled with rhinestone embellishments and styled with maroon or turquoise sweaters.
“There is a lot of illogical behavior,” said Simons, “which is an important notion, in Prada as a whole and this collection specifically. You can have the most industrial thing — Velcro — and the most delicate thing — crystal embroidery — and combine the two.”
Feeling freaky? Swap your sweater for a skimpy bandeau. A below-the-knee skirt can veer matronly. But Mrs. Prada has made it so cool that people of every age want to wear one. “Each skirt can be entirely reinvented by every person who wears it, through its combinations and juxtapositions with other pieces,” she wrote in the show notes. “They can transform its meaning.”
Prada acolytes were rewarded with Easter eggs from prior collections. The full black nylon skirts recalled Spring 2021. Waxed pleated versions evoked Spring 2012, and ones with graphic scribbles recalled the Spring 2011 painterly banana prints.
Aside from all the skirts, models wore little bra tops with coin purses dangling like key chains from their rib cages — details that have already become social media catnip. But it was all in dialogue with the skirt.
This Spring collection seemed more distilled than recent ones. The set at the Prada Foundation was stripped back to white walls and clear acrylic benches, and the collection felt pared down to its most Prada essence. Backstage, Mrs. Prada received congratulations in a gray short-sleeve sweater and pale pink silk skirt — a fitting complement to the collection. For those who know, Mrs. Prada’s uniform is perhaps as recognizable as that iconic triangle logo stamped on bags and below necklines. It is a design language so thoroughly her own that even pieces from other brands, worn in the right combination, can prompt the same reaction: you look very Prada, no logo required.
