One garment, so many possibilities.
Two decades ago Miuccia Prada went on Charlie Rose’s interview show and announced that, as far as she was concerned, “The skirt is like a T-shirt.”
She was talking about its ease, and its essential-ness, and she has never really wavered from that belief in the years since. In case anyone still hadn’t gotten the message, on Tuesday she and her co-creative director, Raf Simons, held a Prada show devoted to 63 knee-length iterations of exactly that idea, and demonstrated to the world what it meant.
There were wool skirts that wrapped like a kilt held together by slabs of industrial Velcro, which was sometimes speckled with sparkling jewels, sometimes not. Skirts in cotton treated to look like leather over similarly treated jackets. Skirts pleated, printed and plaid. Skirts trapped under other skirts.
There were even pastel skirts caught with a little bow at the waist and encased in a scrim of sheer synthetic lining (the kind of thing that normally is hidden), and skirts made from diamanté daisy chains. Skirts that embodied oppositions: masculine and feminine, man-made and natural, soft and hard, frumpy and sexy. Skirts that could be dressed up or dressed down. A lot of skirts, in other words.
The point was the variety of the treatments, not the hemlines or even the shapes, though some skirts were more A-line and some more pencil-straight. The point was the skirt as a canvas, or as Mrs. Prada said in a backstage preview, a “frame,” onto which different ideas and personalities could be grafted.
The point was that the skirt has had a sort of bad rap over time, subsumed to pants as the agent of women’s liberation and signifier of power, and Prada was ready to change that narrative.
“Somebody told me that it’s the most primitive clothing in history for men and women,” Mrs. Prada said, gesturing around her waist to perhaps suggest a caveman wrapping a skin around his midsection. It is certainly one of the original fixations of her Prada.
Indeed, skirts have played such a big role in the brand that in 2004 there was a Prada exhibition in Tokyo that later traveled around the world titled “Waist Down,” devoted to approximately 100 versions of the skirt. (“Well,” Mrs. Prada said somewhat dryly when reminded of that show, “for women a lot happens from the waist down.” Then she snickered.) The newly renovated Prada store in Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, an experiential plunge not just into the Prada world but its universe, includes, among many other special displays, a grouping, natch, of archival skirts.
For this particular runway update, the skirts were shown with an assortment of tops and shoes as if to underscore just how fungible they could be. Add a prim button-up and clunky ’80s pumps with the entire toe cut out and you could be ready for the office; opt for a lacy bra top and delicate flip-flop-like heels with yet more exposed toes (the big, visible toe is still a somewhat inexplicable trend), and head to the club. Toss on a slouchy sweater and chunky slip-ons with tractor-tread-size soles and go to the playground or the grocery store.
Some of the evening tops were closer to bandages or straps than actual tops — more like the suggestion of a top — and sported little clips for attaching a satin pouch. Imagine the way rock climbers clip on their chalk bags, but the BDSM luxury version.
That was about as weird as things got. Rarely has a Prada show in recent times been quite so straightforward or so obvious an acknowledgment that, as Simons said backstage, it’s up to the person who buys the clothes to decide how she wants to use them and who she wants to be. In the end, designers are just proposing a way to get through the day.
One that in this case could be summed up as: Speak softly, and wear a great skirt. It does allow you to take big strides.
The post Prada Says All You Really Need Is a Knee-Length Skirt appeared first on New York Times.
