Walking around Milan earlier this week, I spotted a man wearing an overcoat from Prada’s fall 2016 collection. It was dark wool, about the length of a peacoat, with a gray-black denim panel crawling up the sleeves. It wasn’t the sort of coat a person with a normal, functioning brain would spot from across the street and think, “Gosh, what a great coat.”
But my fashion-pickled prefrontal cortex would’ve recognized that coat anywhere. The first Prada show I ever attended was fall 2016. More than perhaps any other show I’ve been to, that show is seared in my brain — a stormy, gothic-tinged assortment of sailor caps, officer’s coats and burnished monk straps. It was good. Remember it a decade later good. It remains my high-water mark of Prada collections.
So maybe I was thinking more than usual about that show as I sat down at Prada’s latest on Sunday afternoon. And then bam, the first coat to come out was a sprawling double-breasted opera coat — dark in color, knee-length and tight to the body — so similar to the coats from that collection 10 years ago.
These coats (about a third of the show) had an hourglass shape, but were soft at the shoulder. With the model’s hands wedged in the pockets, they flapped at the hems like tweedy flags catching a breeze.
Like the coats of the 2016 collection, these new ones were styled with the shirt sleeves protruding outward. You could see those cotton cuffs over the coats. After days of conveyor belt-perfect overcoats at the other shows, Prada’s airy, slightly awkward shapes felt as fresh as ice water.
“That’s fashion,” Miuccia Prada said backstage when asked how that silhouette countered what is so prevalent on the market now.
“It’s also very comforting in a way, that very soft shoulder — it’s not hard” said Raf Simons, her creative partner. “We did want to make that statement.”
At Prada I’m looking for things that feel alien. Things that, when they first come out, make me shake my head. But maybe, by the third time I see a model wearing a witchy hat that looks as if it got run over by a semi, I start to think, well … maybe? This is what I go to Prada for.
I adored the techy raincoats in egg yolk, spearmint and aubergine that were plopped over trench coats, like guillotined capelets. Within this otherwise muted collection, these candy-colored layers were like scoops of sorbet after a rich meal.
I was drawn in by the belt-waist anoraks, particularly one in pistachio green. It was worn with a matching beret at a tilt — a jaunty outfit that looked like something out of Details magazine in the 1980s.
I was less sure of the striped medical-type smock (yes, it buttoned up the back), and a U-neck knit cami in red. But sour notes were rare in this collection, which gave men’s fashion a needed nudge toward new shapes and spry colors.
Somewhere past the middle of the show, out came a straight-up mac coat — tan on the surface but with its fabric peeling away, like flaky house paint, to reveal a houndstooth pattern beneath. That, I thought, was a great idea: a classic silhouette, rendered new by erosion. I wonder if I’ll see that coat on the streets of Milan in 2036. I hope so.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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