Review of Prada Fall 2022 Fashion Show
Tradition Rewritten
By Mark Wittmer
Prada’s Fall 2022 collection again cemented the quiet brilliance of the creative director partnership between Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, who have used each season to build on the ideas and techniques of their past work, as well as the design history of the house, while always feeling decisively contemporary. This idea of listening for the echoes of the past and considering how they shape modern expression was especially present in this collection.
Tradition is about humanity – connections between people, passing down knowledge.
– Miuccia Prada, Prada Co-Creative Director
A human history. These ideas interested us – to look at how and why things had been
created in certain ways. But there is only a trace, a memory. It’s not retro, at all.”
Elements from their previous collections – internal structure drawn from corsetry, strong-shouldered yet unbulky tailoring, slim low-hipped dress silhouettes, crisp and luxurious sweaters, precise use of the triangle logo – return. But subtly reimagined with new yet historically-minded materials, in particular sinuous sheer fabric, which is often treated with small yet blooming moments of embroidery, and cascading feathers.
Many elements from last month’s men’s collection also return here, slightly reconfigured but largely left intact: the trench coats with tech-mohair sleeve ornamentations – this time around also with feathers – the wide-shouldered suit jackets, the nylon and leather bombers.
What doesn’t return from the men’s show is its workwear, which together with the suiting imbued that collection with a thorough conceptual intertwining of labor and leisure, utility and utopia. This collection is harder to pin a concept to.
Where a similar idea of contrast does appear, however, is in the sportswear-like tank tops, which feel like a Prada’d-up version of something you might expect to see someone wearing in a yoga class or on a jog – though of course not with an embroidered sheer skirt on the bottom.
Coupled with the craft and formality of much of the rest of the pieces, this movement-focused sportswear element lends to the collection a holistic sense of activity; encompassing intimately individual lives and sweeping historical movements, it is a dignified dressing that takes into account all the motion and stillness in the actions of life and womanhood. The delicacy and traditional femininity of flowers meets the strength of power suiting; the historic opulence of feathers meets the future-minded innovation of Re-Nylon; the prim restrictiveness of corsetry meets the psychedelic free-spiritedness of 70’s knitwear.
Especially after the pandemic’s rewriting of the boundaries of personal life, social life, and work life, many designers have been exploring a liminal realm where these aspects meet. But no one else is doing it with the same finesse and intellectualism as the partnership of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, nor are they managing to deftly incorporate it into their brands’ entire design history and vocabulary like Prada. Looking back to tradition, Prada creates something that is entirely modern.