Miuccia Prada loves the mountains. “I remember being young, when it was hot, and you’d go skiing in your bikini,” she recalled in a digital press conference after her Miu Miu screening, taking the prize for Fashion Week’s most fabulous flashback. “It looks strange, but in the end, it’s not.” This season, her Prada collections have illustrated an internalized-externalized fashion mentality to which we can all relate, coming out of a year of domestic dressing. Captured epically in high snow in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites, her Miu Miu collection took that emotion to an extreme.
Through a literal lens, it was the most obvious transition from indoor to outdoor dressing you could imagine: a code-switch between lingerie and skiwear. Figuratively, it was post-confinement psychology: a material outpouring of our mental state of undress and the compulsion to cover it up and put our best (and furriest) foot forward. Padded bustiers and bodices proposed alongside silk-satin slip dresses—some with aggressive spiky straps—conceived a kind of alpine lingerie (“For me, very sexy stuff,” said Prada) juxtaposed by mittens and mountain boots fit for a faux-fur yeti.
In a cliché world, we’ll dress for self-protection—furry mega boots for the brave—but the Miu Miu collection was a lot more layered than that. The show notes recounted the production of the impressive video as “a difficult and brave undertaking.” Prada spoke about its contrasts between panorama shots and close-ups as a relation between “the person and the grandness.” It summed up an ambivalent approach to the post-lockdown wardrobe many can identify with: a desire to hide and dress up all at once. “Daring clothes, but possible,” Prada said.
The collection offered methods to the madness in meetings between the two poles, like oversized ski suits rendered in dusty pastel boudoir satins, knitted balaclavas (that double as a face mask), girly and glamorous takes on Fair Isle jumpers, and the jumpsuits—in this case, ski onesies—that Prada has been pushing in a big way this season. We’ve tired of talk of comfy lockdown dressing by now, but many of these garments really were very viable proposals for those not quite ready to leave those comforts behind.
The film climaxed in a bonfire ritual in the snow. It felt pagan, like a love letter to the nature the world seems to have reconnected with over the past year, and gained new respect for. “Nature is the one thing that heals you,” Prada said. “I love mountain adventures.”
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Anders Christian Madsen
