Prada Men’s Spring 2024
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Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons delivered fashion fireworks galore with their spring 2024 men’s show for Prada, conceived as a freewheeling exploration of the shirt — which some audience members viewed through curtains of slime flanking parts of the runway.
“Fluid Form” was the title they gave to the collection, which further propelled the trend of lightweight garments this Milan season, while also introducing a host of new silhouettes and ideas.
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Backstage the famously cerebral design duo dropped the names of several artists they appreciate — Matthew Barney for his body-based performance works and surgical color palette; Joseph Beuys for his arresting sculptural forms, and H.R. Giger, whose “biomechanical” art style spawned the original “Alien” in the Ridley Scott film franchise.
But the shirt was their big idea and starting point, which they morphed with 1940s men’s tailoring to create strong-shouldered cotton poplin jacket hybrids that can be tucked into high-waist pants or jutting shorts for a radical, pinched-waist silhouette.
Here was something arrestingly new that is bound to influence the shape of menswear in the future — the wideness of the shoulders and the narrowness of the waist heightened by the extra-wide, extra-long sleeves with button cuffs.
Blue shirt collars were added to handsome and roomy Macintosh-style raincoats, while other details from the shirt turned up in technical outerwear, and new takes on the reporter jacket.
Prada and Simons even confronted one of menswear’s most unfortunate garments — the Hawaiian shirt — and bent it to their will, dispensing with the boxy, camp-shirt shape they helped popularize in recent years to focus on softer, Beuys-esque forms.
Meanwhile, they blurred and disguised the gaudy floral decorations of Hawaiian shirts by adding epaulets, panels of swishing, printed fringe, or three-dimensional origami blooms.
The duo experimented with other ways to decorate shirts. Little tufts of fur, like too much chest hair, emerged from the placket of polos, which also had hairy protrusions jutting from the sleeve heads.
Pockets were another big story.
“More than utilitarian, we saw them like three-dimensional decorations,” Prada explained backstage in a press scrum, after greeting editors and gamely posing for selfies with scores of VICs and brand fans.
Puffy pockets were tacked to shirt sleeves like badges, and coagulated in multiples on the front of shirts and utility vests, sometimes in concert with D-rings.
Five-pocket jeans, denim shirts with removable shoulder pads, and boyish shorts with partially elasticized waistbands were among the more accessible items in this terrific collection, which had a youthful zing.
Headbands, neo cat-eye sunglasses and glossy red lips brought to mind 1950s beauty ideals — one of those aesthetic curveballs you can expect from Prada.
Once the show ended, the steady ooze of slime from the steel mesh ceiling subsided. Some guests fastidiously dodged the pools of green gunk that had accumulated on the floor while others seemed eager to explore the strange fluid with their hands and fingers.
After this daring show, it’s clear Prada and Simons would fall in the latter group.
Launch Gallery: Prada Men's Spring 2024
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