At Milan Fashion Week, Prada balances beauty and history

In the Fall/Winter 2024 Prada collection, a compelling fusion of history and contemporary aesthetics takes center stage, marking the strongest collaborative exchange between Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons so far as Prada’s co-creative directors.

This collection is not merely a chronological exploration, from the feathered caps to the wool skirt suits, rather a narrative woven with fragments of history, an homage to the romance embedded in bygone eras. The designers, astutely aware of the profound impact history exerts on the present, utilise clothing as a medium to reference diverse periods, from 1920s slip dresses to 1990s ivy league collegiate jackets, creating a symphony of echoes that transcend time.

In a statement Prada said the collection is not an intellectual dissection but an emotional response, an attempt to reimagine beauty ideals rooted in the enduring resonance of the past.

Crafted by Dutch architects OMA, the Showspace for the Prada Fall/Winter 2024 womenswear spectacle becomes a canvas that artfully captures the tension between confined indoor experiences and the innate human connection to the vast outdoors. A babbling brook amongst mosses and forestry is covered by a transparent glass floor, on which models walked and the audience sat.

In this collection, history isn't a static relic; it's a dynamic instrument wielded to forge something entirely new—a testament to the designers' mastery in leveraging the emotional and aesthetic depths of the past to shape a captivating contemporary narrative.