The corrosive effects of our online lives have been pretty front and center recently. So it shouldn’t be a surprise, really, that the subject has reached the runways. Or that it was Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons who took it on most directly in their Prada show.
“Anything we like, we know it’s because other people” — the ones whose content has been served up by a form of code in our social feeds — “are instilling it into us,” Mrs. Prada said backstage as a host of reporters thrust their (ahem) smartphones, the instruments of the problem, in the designers’ faces. She and Mr. Simons smiled a little resignedly.
They were talking about the echo chambers created by online algorithms. Suggesting the resulting alternate realities don’t just warp our politics, establishing a self-perpetuating loop in which we are constantly shown only those things already identified as triggers for more viewing — they warp our wardrobes, too. Hence the proliferation of micro trend after micro trend: the avalanche of “cores” currently dominating shopping sites everywhere (tenniscore, balletcore, dadcore, you-name-it-core).
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if auto-generated style were replaced by original style? What would that look like?
Mrs. Prada and Mr. Simons had an idea. Actually, 49 of them, for 49 different moods or selves.
Maybe, for example, it would look like a metallic leather road-warrior miniskirt under a very polite little faux-fur-collared tweed jacket, because manners are important, but so is an exit strategy. Maybe it would look like a butter yellow strapless ’60s evening gown paired with ginormous buglike sci-fi sunglasses, because the mood was Maria Callas about to sing an aria on Mars.
Maybe it would look like emerald ribbed-knit tights and a matching undershirt with a sheer black tea dress on top. Or a silver-encrusted sequined diva dress, worn under a highlighter-yellow nylon anorak with a conical face shade (a face shade! what even is that?). Or button-up C-suite shirts with wire edging, so the collars stood out as though they had been buffeted in the wind and the hems bunched just so. Or a skirt with giant holes punched out of the middle, as if it had been through an asteroid storm.
Mostly it would look like you had reached into your closet and started layering on stuff that had been kept around because it had meaning. It might look weird. It definitely would look chaotic. (In this case, it might also look like a tour through Prada past: Wait — that’s the platform oxford shoe from 2011. The flat from ’96. and so on). But it would look, above all, alive.
“I was very nervous for this show,” Mrs. Prada said backstage. “Much more than usual.”
It was in essence an anti-trend manifesto, from a designer who has arguably been responsible for more trends than almost anyone else in Milan. That’s both wild and ironic, but if you can’t beat the algo, you have to break it. And, as Mrs. Prada also pointed out, the randomness of curiosity, the ability to make the unexpected choice, is also the essentially human. Mr. Simons called it a superpower. In itself, that is a beautiful thing.
Humanity has been a sort of subtheme in Milan (somewhere in every designer’s mind, like any employee’s mind, there is apparently a niggling worry about being replaced by a computerized neural network).
At Roberto Cavalli, for example, Fausto Puglisi defined it as family, and closed his first show since Mr. Cavalli’s death in April with a septet of the founder’s favorite supermodels, including Alek Wek, Eva Herzigova and Natasha Poly, all wearing archival dresses from 2000 to 2004, and pulling Mr. Cavalli’s widow, Eva Cavalli, onto the runway to take a finale walk with them. It was touching. More so than the rest of the clothes, anyway, which were pretty tame by Cavalli’s classic every-animal-under-the-sun-in-one-print standards.
And at Fendi, Kim Jones explored modernity through the brand’s almost 100 years of matriarchy in tones of sand, cream and champagne. Exquisitely beaded 1920s shifts on transparent tulle evoked the decade of the brand’s birth as well as Art Deco architecture, but Fendi x Red Wing hiking boots and slouchy tulle knee socks embroidered with rhinestones gave them a tougher edge. So did knit hot pants and crocodile T-shirt shifts, boss lady shirt dresses and swaddling bathrobe shearlings.
Again, choice was on the menu, albeit not quite as radically as at Prada. Again the point was: Dress for yourself. It could be the gateway drug for thinking for yourself. Who knows where that could lead?
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