Review of Prada Fall 2023 Men’s Fashion Show
Archetypes and Architecture
By Mark Wittmer
Peeling back the layers and playing with proportions to hold up a distorted mirror to what is most essential to our notions of clothing and to the identity of Prada, creative director duo Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons served up a Fall 2023 menswear collection that subverted our expectations while more than meeting them.
This collection is about archetypal clothing, about taking the recognizable but changing it through silhouette and cut – their form language is transformed. It is also about the DNA of Prada, clothes embedded with fragments of an identity we can recognize as fundamentally Prada.”
– Raf Simons, Prada Co-Creative Director
Hybridity and subtle plays on proportion characterize a spectrum of sophisticated menswear classics, with a few less categorizable and less “masculine” pieces thrown in for good measure. The first paired looks out the gate would seem like relatively straightforward rectangularly cut suits, were it not for the disembodied bits of sweater clinging to attached pointy (like really pointy) collars that had us stumped for a moment into believing there was an actual shirt underneath.
That idea of bare skin as a constant base for clothing carried throughout the collection, with under-layers ranging from bare torso to a scoop-neck, almost camisole-like tank (we saw a similar piece at Gucci, perhaps a trend is coming to be), to a shirt and tie under a smock/shirt/dress hybrid (but, intriguingly, no suit and tie was seen without this dress-like piece) building out the idea of clothing as structure and interface.
A reductionist attitude toward tailoring and construction runs throughout: details are stripped back to let amplified or reduced proportions speak for themselves; colors are solid, blocky, and bold; the only place any prints appear are on the shirtless collars, as if this clothing is haunted by a different idea of dressing but as a matter of discipline abstains from it.
Anticipating the simple and slick silk bombers that come later while riffing on the idea of covetable, “grail” pieces in contemporary menswear, a ballooning jacket sardonically invites comparison to Kanye West’s infamous puffer jacket from his former collaboration with Gap (a number which was paired alongside a few even more pillowy looks that made the ostensibly random throw pillow included with the invite make a bit more sense).
The two bags are extremely practical, and only come in one size each: a tophandle tote bag in embossed or smooth leather, which often carried a water bottle, and a small and prim satchel worn around the shoulders and chest.
Rigorous and reductionist, the collection shows an analytic – but still not unimaginative – side of Prada that applies its designers’ keen intellect to shed light on and tease apart our notions of category and identity. Deconstructionism in fashion is perhaps becoming a bit of an overused idea, and while this collection isn’t deconstructionist in terms of visible seams, destroyed fabrics, and ephemerality, it offers a similar and perhaps more insightful look at clothing as a built up visual language, as a social and even linguistic process.