BY LONG MGUYEN
Making it Personal
“Rashomon” won a surprise special honorary foreign language film award at the 24th Academy Awards in 1952, the first for an obscure Japanese feature film by an unknown and obscure Japanese director, Akira Kurosawa.
Four protagonists – a priest, a wood-cutter, a commoner, and a bandit – narrated their own eyewitness accounts of the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife by a local bandit: four people chronicled a singular event with four different tales in this black and white film that championed innovative over traditional cinematographic and narrative structures.
On the contrary, Prada commissioned five artists in the visual arts – the Dutch and German photographers Willy Vanderperre and Jurgen Teller, the American film director Terence Nance, the Polish filmmaker Joanna Piotrowska, and the American artist Martine Syms – to create short visual films using looks from the spring collection for the series ‘Multiple views – The show that never happened’ that launched the Milano men’s digital show season. Five artists offer five personal views of a very direct and powerful spring collection that is simply the essence of Prada – refined, minimal, and pure.
In lieu of an actual physical show, this video compilation serves as a process of self-discovery in a sense for both Prada and for the consumers – a process of distillation that filtered out anything considered extraneous. This ethos is what catapults Prada into one of luxury’s biggest and most influential company over so many years, and this show serves to bring this origin, this point of view and this departure point to a new audience, for them to experience anew – now in an environment where there is more conscious efforts to control waste – both in the excesses of so many cluttered products and in terms of sustainability. Viewing the presentation on the brand’s live feed from New York, I remember how many of the looks from some of Prada’s first men’s shows that I saw in Milano way back in the mid-1990s conveyed a similar aesthetics to those walking into the frame of my iMac today.
Striped of any art settings created specifically for each of the shows in the past, this time the clothes stand by themselves as principle actors with neither aid nor distraction to disturb the audience’s attention. These multiple views however offer a singular vision of Prada simply because the strength of the clothes connects how different people can see the same thing. Distilled of any decorations both on and off the garments – this is fashion at its purest form in terms of design and product.
In the opening frames of Chapter 1, Vanderperre filmed a group of models entering a studio with a view of their backs walking away from the camera, these sharp ghosts like shots show the dominant menswear shape of the coming season – narrow at shoulder and waist, slim fitted and linear lines. The black narrow and fitted coats over slim pants, the black single-breasted narrow shoulder suit, the grey narrow waist suit, and the white fitted cotton shirt and black short pants distill not only the season’s clean and straight forward silhouette but these clothes summarize the essence of Prada’s design approach and intent.
We see a recycled nylon suit that feels like wearing a pajama. We need also to understand how this suit comes into being – that this suit is simply the end product starting with a specific design idea and concept. The lightness of this recycled nylon fabric, a technological innovation, of a single-breasted suit as it moved and swirled across the model of a model walking into and out of the frame mirrors the firm intention of the design ethos that permeates and pervades in each featured look in these 5 segments.
From the recent experiences of the London and Paris digital show week, evoking emotion in a fashion film has been one of the most difficult tasks to achieve. But in Joanna Piotrowska’s Chapter 3 film, two models in a black studio snap their fingers to signal a movement of time and space to each other. This repetition while serving to change frames and outfits – white shirt, leather shoulder bag, and grey pant to shiny gray suit or grey leather jacket – suggests a memory or a history lost somewhere as the filmmaker conveys the emotion of loneliness in her visual story. In the digital world of loneliness, there is perhaps a real search for human connection but in reality, one set of hands never touches the other like the models here reaching out to each other with their bare hands but never touching.
“The film that came through was born of speed and play,” said the American filmmaker Terence Nance of his film, the last chapter, which features clothes from the Prada Linea Rossa. Originally launched in 1997, Prada Linea Rossa was a pioneer of luxury sportswear and streetwear – innovative materials with technical fabrications with streamline, functional and athletic products. Now reincarnated as Prada Linea Rossa since fall 2018 with the same ideas to offer a range of functional products – anoraks, hoodies, shirts, tee-shirts, drawstring pants, sneakers – items that are now a key focus for growth for menswear luxury brands.
‘Multiple views’ ended with a form of a pseudo runway finale where most of the models from the videos walked out in a full lineup showing the selection of clothes featured in each of the five segments. In these times, the simplicity of these clothes even as they disguised their complex history and fabrication offer much more to our minds and to our hearts. Customers too can create pictures or films of themselves wearing these clothes with the same effect as seen on ‘Multiple views’
In keeping with tradition, Miuccia Prada made her usual brief appearance, exiting briefly from behind an opening in the concrete walls to acknowledge the audience as she has done so every season. Some things will not change.
