Miuccia Prada is one of the great oracles of fashion; a woman whose ability to suss out the complications and messiness and burgeoning desires in women’s lives and reflect them in clothes has elevated her to near-mythical status.
This is especially true when it comes to her Miu Miu line, which she has made into a sort of petri dish for experimenting with the clichéd accouterments of femininity — aprons, prom dresses, lingerie, governess weeds — and re-appropriating them in unexpected ways to her own (and everyone else’s) ends.
So it was a surprise on Sunday afternoon in Paris to see that the biggest new variable in her alchemical kit was — sportswear. Literally: sports bras and short stretchy workout shorts and sweatpants and zip-up sweat shirts. Also New Balance sneakers (they have a collaboration) and upcycled Wrangler jeans (ditto).
The bras started as cropped tops under hacking jackets and over low-slung pleated schoolgirl plaid skirts that had been laced up one hip — or unlaced — to show a bit of leg. Morphed into scarves tied into halters atop tough biker leather skirts buckled on the side. Then got bejeweled for evening. The shorts, in signature 1970s prints, tied with a drawstring and worn like boxers, peeking out from waistbands. The sweats were striped, and subbed in for blazers.
“It’s how people dress now,” Prada shrugged after the show. “Basically, it’s daywear or red carpet. So I thought that I’d bring elegance to the sport and vice versa.”
Fair enough. But here’s the thing: It’s also how people have been dressing for awhile. Sports and fashion have been in an extended relationship that long ago reached critical mass (Prada itself was part of all that, with its Linea Rossa line). So while it was, as always, a blast to see Prada’s take on the subject, the result seemed less a sign of things to come or a challenge to the status quo than a sort of late addition to the conversation.
Even with Prada’s now-signature cast of recognizable faces there to animate — or distract from — the ideas: Olivia Colman, in a black leather skirt suit; Louisa Jacobson, in a scarf halter top, chocolate sweatpants and navy blazer; Igby Rigney of “The Shards” in a V-neck with team stripes on the arms and a bungee cord belt; and Emma Corrin in tiny white running shorts and a faux snakeskin jacket. Among others.
(The Miu Miu shows have lately become an opportunity to play the fun game of Spot the Celebrity, the Catwalk Version.)
Still, in one respect at least, Prada absolutely called it: the plethora of sports bras. Bras, or bra-like tops, or bras as tops, have become one of the most ubiquitous trends of the season, along with their corollary: the exposed abdomen.
It began back in Milan, with (yup) Prada and Fendi — not to mention the relaunch of La Perla, the storied lingerie brand — and has only gathered more momentum in Paris, where Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford effectively, if not intentionally, proposed the sexy yin to Miu Miu’s sporty yang. In between the two extremes, all sorts of variations have emerged.
There were, for example, bra tops that looked like nothing so much as rhino horns at Jean Paul Gaultier, the designer Duran Lantink’s new absurdist take on the already somewhat absurdist (but more … well, pointed) Gaultier cone bra. They had the starring role in a show that mostly seemed calculated for social media shock value.
There were crisscross silk halter bras at Valentino, as part of Alessandro Michele’s signature evening wear pastiche, which increasingly seems to be getting sucked into a vortex of eclecticism that spins around and around and goes nowhere.
There were even bandeau bra tops crafted from leather and silk scarves at Hermès, mixed up with the airy knits and buttery leathers, part of Nadège Vanhée’s new, more subversive take on the brand’s famous classicism. And floral bra tops as part of trompe l’oeil party dresses at Loewe, where Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez continue to clarify their ideas about the combination of craft and sportswear (the typical fashion kind, not the athletic kind) to pretty zippy effect.
As to why all these bras, Prada herself may be to blame, or rather the cropped top-and-ultra-low-waist-miniskirt set she introduced about four years ago at Miu Miu that dominated the influencer sphere, spawned a thousand copies, and made the brand into a veritable phenomenon.
Combine that with the rise of naked dressing, nostalgia among the next gen set for the ’90s and Y2K (the last years before social media) and GLP-1-inspired urges to show off newly shrunken bodies; power it with celebrity buy-in, as on the recent VMAs red carpet; and you get brazilla. Bralapalooza. The ultimate late-stage capitalist conclusion to the second wave feminists’ call for bra burning. Bra-vo?
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