Prada and Miu Miu are not new to the I.P.F.O. section of this blog.
The focus of today's column is actually Prada’s Autumn/Winter 2011-12 collection.
A friend of mine kindly lent me some old copies of a few British magazines from the ‘60s (among them there are also a few issues of Vogue), since I’m doing a new research for a project I’m involved in that focuses on the Swinging London scene.
My main hope was actually finding images featuring model Jill Kennington striking poses (View this photo) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up.
But, during this trip through the past that occupied most of my weekend, I suddenly found myself into the future, spotting in one magazine something that most of us saw just a few days ago on the Milan’s runways.
In this pic taken from the 1966 September issue of UK Vogue (downloaded from this blog as my scanner has momentarily exploded), Kennington wears a coat that looks incredibly like one of the coats we saw at Prada’s.
Prada’s collection started from a very basic idea: reinterpreting in an innocent way luxurious materials such as cashmere, fur, snakeskin and sequins.
Based on a dropped-waist silhouette that evoked the ‘60s, the collection mainly included cocooning cashmere, python and gabardine coats with fur sleeves or fur lapels and wool gabardine dresses.
There may have been references to Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress, but the graphic patterns, block prints and checks with bright red belts also seemed to evoke Roberta di Camerino’s dresses. In fact when I first saw the collection I thought more about being a Roberta di Camerino rip off, with just one main difference: the late Italian designer created trompe l’oeil effects on her dresses, Miuccia went instead for real wide belts and buttons, though she kept the trompe l’oeil effect for her python boots that, from far away, looked like a pair of Mary Janes worn with knee-high socks.
Everything was perfect, though slightly déjà vu perfect if I can say so, including the aviator caps in wool and fur, matched with dresses covered in shards of dégradé sequins in mermaid style or with sequins shining on fake fur (will we find also these designs in another magazine from the ‘60s?).
The mixture of powdery colours and strong reds at times brought back memories of Antonioni’s Deserto Rosso and Monica Vitti’s coats (View this photo) in the film maybe hinting at subtler moods in the collection and at a more sophisticated and complicated woman than the one we actually saw sashaying down the runway at Prada’s.
One question remains now: if Prada borrows/steals/pilfers an idea from the past and it successfully sells, is that the final proof that everything has already been tried and done in fashion and that we are mainly re-vomiting what we saw in the past without even reinventing it (or just slightly reinventing it)? Does this mean that fashion is totally useless?
Guess these are rather difficult questions to answer, especially on a Monday morning, yet I wouldn't mind getting a proper answer from many contemporary designers out there, Miuccia Prada included.
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