Who can resist a comic print? They are cool, they are always in fashion and they are also fun in a Pop Art key - Roy Lichtenstein docet. So it was only natural for Miuccia Prada to go for comics for the house's S/S 18 collection.
The gigantic comic strip that characterised the runway space in Via Fogazzaro for the men's show was readapted for the women's presentation that took place yesterday afternoon.
Prada's Milanese headquarters were redecorated indeed with the work of eight women artists - Brigid Elva Deacon, Jöelle Jones, Stellar Leuna, Giuliana Maldini, Natsume Ono, Emma Rios, Trina Robbins and Fiona Staples, plus bits and pieces of Tarpé Mills's Miss Fury, the first female action-hero.
Different moods and styles were therefore combined in the set, going from manga and punk to fantasy and sci-fi. Yet, while the men's show was suspended between the surreal and A-Ha with just a touch of Devo and Thayaht, there was something more serious going on in the women's designs, something more...militant.
In the backstage Miuccia claimed she wanted to change the world, especially for women. With women's rights being constantly threatened on a global level by buffoons like Donald Trump and with very dark episodes of violence against women and femicides on the rise in Italy, who can disagree with her?
Miuccia proceeded therefore to replace Robert E. McGinnis's poster girls from the previous season with (wealthy) activist and combative women clad in practical attires ready to fight for their rights.
One part of the collection included playfully serious reinventions of traditional classics such as men's coats, jackets, raincoats, cropped pants and striped shirts remixed with knotted bustiers (a few garments seemed to combine together shirts and brocade ball skirts into one single design).
Animal (zebra and leopard-spot) prints for lapels and collars and necklaces with cartoony images broke the monotony with a fun element, while pointy shoes covered in studs and colourful sneakers added a level of punkishness and dynamism to the garments.
Quite a few designs came with creases showing as if they had just come out of the printing press (a trick slightly reminiscent of Hermès' trompe l'oeil designs...), almost to hint at handprinted fanzines and handmade posters and fliers. At times the imperfect prints seemed to leave large white areas behind or vertical and horizontal marks and stains on skirts, reminiscent in some cases of the blood stains on Jöelle Jones's Lady Killer's '50s gowns.
The comics inspiration was then scattered here and there on the clothes and accessories: Miss Fury appeared on a bag; Trina Robbins' dynamic working heroine Rosie the Riveter decorated a pale pink jumper and a handbag.
Illustrations from Brigid Elva's "Coma Deep" and from Stellar Leuna's artworks reappered on coats and jackets; at times the illustrations were fractured and recombined together while the garments were embellished with clusters of buttons reminiscent of Viktor & Rolf's Haute Couture A/W 2016 collection.
So far so good, you may argue, this could have indeed been a darker version of Fiorucci's fun comic prints from the '80s, but, as it stood, it seemed to work.
And then came one image in the collection that made you think about further political issues. One of the prints showed indeed Angela Davis, a terrifically strong woman, and a reference that made a real difference from Prada's pink Candy fragrance comic from 2014, in which the protagonist was intent in finding in space a fantastic floral scent (View this photo).
A Black Panther Party associate, activist, educator and author, Angela Davis became known in the '60s for her counterculture and radical actions, she was a leader of the Communist Party USA, and was involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
In her career Davis researched about feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons (she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization committed to ending the Prison-Industrial Complex).
In August 1970 Davis was prosecuted for conspiracy when the firearms used in the armed take-over of a Marin County, California courtroom (four persons were killed during it) by Jonathan Jackson, were claimed to have been registered in her name. Jackson, a 17-year-old African-American high-school student wanted to liberate several prisoners from the courthouse. Davis became a fugitive (the third woman in history to appear on the FBI's ten most wanted list...) and fled California hiding in friends' homes and moving at night.
Davis was eventually captured in October 1970, appeared at the Marin County Superior Court in January and declared her innocence, while people began organizing a movement to free her. She was released on bail in 1972 and finally declared not guilty in June of the same year.
Davis appears also in art: in Renato Guttuso's painting "The Funerals of Togliatti" (1972), she is among other communist figures in one corner including Guttuso himself, Elio Vittorini, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Davis was an honorary co-chair of the January 21, 2017 Women's March on Washington, that took place the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as President.
Angela Davis sounds like the sort of strong woman Miuccia Prada may like, no super heroine, just an individual trying to radically change things. So it must have looked like a good idea to Miuccia Prada to reuse Trina Robbins' poster stating "Sister, you are welcome in this house" for some of her designs, coats and bags (the poster was reprinted and reused in installations more recently by another artist, Andrea Bowers).
There is actually a story behind the poster: the idea was to put it into your window and, if Angela Davis running away from law had seen the poster, she could walk in the door and be able to hide from the police.
Miuccia was clever enough not to come up with one of those vapid feminist slogan T-shirts that have been plaguing the runways and the High Street stores in the last few months (yes, you know what we are talking about, "Feminist", "This Is What a Feminist Looks Like", "Girl Power", "Girls for Girls" and such likes...).
She was also brave enough not to go down "The Handmaid's Tale" road, like other designers have recently done with cringing results (no, dressing your models like the main characters in the TV series is not going to liberate anybody...). Yet there is a serious problem here: Angela Davis wasn't even mentioned in connection with this collection, but during interviews with Miuccia the media attention was re-switched to the soundtrack, a combination of female voices from Nina Simone and Suzanne Vega to Lana Del Rey.
In a way not mentioning Angela Davis was a faux pas: the collection works because of the comics integrated in the clothes, without them the garments do not look very different from any other Prada offer. At the same time, the social message behind the comics works when you mention it; if you don't, well, you are going to lose the supposedly revolutionary intent behind the garments. If Miuccia wanted to empower women she should have mentioned Angela Davis, so that young students who may not know who she is will be able to check her biography and her works.
So why didn't she do it? Was she scared of the deeply political connections she would have given to the designs if Angela Davis' name had come out and worried about further drop in figures in case (Prada suffered an 18% decline in net profit recently)? Or was she afraid of critics accusing her of appropriating African-American history and of turning riot grrrl rebellion into a white riot? The doubt remains.
In a 2007 television interview, Angela Davis stated that Herbert Marcuse had taught her that it was possible to be "an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary." If she had been mentioned in this collection maybe we may have even started believing that a fashion designer can genuinely be an activist, a scholar, an academic and, why not, a revolutionary.
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