Marie Antoinette has been much in the fashion news lately. Miuccia Prada took the opposing tack at Miu Miu: not 18th-century court panniers but the proletarian aprons of female workers. “We in fashion always talk about glamour or rich people, but we have to recognise also that life is very difficult,” she said. “And to me the apron contains the real difficult life of women in history, from factories to the home.”
The set was laid out to suggest a factory canteen, the audience perching on melamine-topped tables, the space covered in some kind of red rubberised flooring, the air suffused with a vague odour of cleaning fluid.
Sandra Huller led out in the heavy-duty utilitarian apron of a factory worker, hands in pockets. At first it seemed Prada was acknowledging a reality of the fashion industry’s reliance—and her own—on the unseen manual skills of production-line workers and craftspeople. Protective leather aprons, cotton drill pinafores, canvas tool belts, bags like tool-kits, woven leather belts dangling D-rings for specialist implements and safety boots—all these suggested the paraphernalia donned by workers over their own clothes when they clock in.
Then she shifted to look at the other unacknowledged workers who support the functioning of everything, everywhere: the unthanked armies of cleaners and domestic staff, tying their floral wrap-over housecoats and smocks over their day clothes and invisibly getting on with whatever has to be done.
Contained within this type of apron is also the generational memory of homemakers. Mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers in the kitchen, perhaps immigrants, who were as much laughed at as loved. The kind of non-stop providers who’d also head out for night shifts when everyone’s fed and asleep, who nobody ever thinks to give credit. And who exist now—the lowest-paid workers, glimpsed out of the corners of eyes in hotels and offices and factories, design studios and behind the scenes at fashion shows.
Miuccia Prada put that out on her Miu Miu runway and made it fashion. The light fetishisation of the domestic apron showed up in bright see-through lace summer dresses and in dark ruffled taffeta and leather.
Come summer next year, it’s bizarre to think how two equally fashionable women may well be standing next to each other on the same red carpet: one dressed as a notional Marie Antoinette, and the other in a notional working-class Miu Miu apron. As fashion’s feminist intellectual-in-chief, Miuccia Prada is not oblivious to how her collection may stand as an illustration of the gulf between rich and poor that exists now. “At the moment, I’m particularly sensitive to that. So translating them [the aprons] into fashion was more difficult,” she said. “But I use the instrument I have.”
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