Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons present the Prada women's spring summer 2023 collection as part of Milan Fashion Week. See the key looks and collection notes below.
Collection notes
The Prada Spring/Summer 2023 women’s collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presents a sequence of realities - reflections, refractions, and observations. Acts of reality.
The raw and sensual
There is an interrelationship between the raw and the sensual, between delicacy and roughness, and emulsification of contrasts. The collection plays constantly with dissimilitude and paradox, shifting between different visions, and separate realities. Mirroring the décor of the show space - a black paper panopticon, itself a sublimation of a domestic sphere, a reality – a paper-based fabric is used for a series of dresses, torn against the body, intimate and impulsive. Human gestures animate surfaces - traces of life shape the forms of garments, intentional rifts, twists, creases, and folds capture a spontaneity, like memories of beauty embedded in the cloth. Acts of refinement are energized with a sense of the accidental, representative of creative freedom, and gestures of liberation.
Reality translates to humanity
It is reflected through a sense of the hand, a touch of the crude, a rawness that evokes a fragility. Day and evening clothes cross-pollinate, the signs and signifiers of each shifting - opera coats fuse with leather jackets, tailoring borrows trains of fabric. Clothes for the intimacy of the home in delicate pastel tones fuse with outerwear, a blurring of distinct realities, while a notion of Prada uniform, in bodysuits of poplin shirting in industrial colors, denotes a minimalized reality. Accessories propose an antique Nappa, surfaces patinated, pressed, and wrinkled, used to reinterpret archetypal and classic Prada handbag silhouettes. Polarities are explored between minimalism and decoration, occasion and everyday - as in life, in reality, unanticipated dichotomies are observed, explored, and embraced.
Nicolas Winding Refn
For the Spring/Summer 2023 women’s runway show, Prada invites the viewpoint of film director Nicolas Winding Refn to conceive an experience around the collection. Entailing an immersive installation and the runway show’s physical environs in collaboration with AMO, it is an opportunity for observation and intersection between two creative spheres, an expansion. At the center of the creative exchange sit a series of short films by NWR, exploring the lives of women, and the scope of fluid modern femininity - a subject matter that has always fascinated Prada. These films are presented physically to the audience within the installation at the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada. Through raw apertures punched through the décor, fragments of NWR’s shorts may be observed, and the audience inside is afforded the opportunity to look out, to more realities.
Key looks
