After the Prada show, a photographer asked what Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons got up to this season. When the reply came that they were interrogating femininity and asking themselves “what is feminine beauty today?” the photographer sniggered, “er, double Ds.” It was said in jest, but he made his point. Idealized beauty and our relentless quest to achieve it is the preoccupation of our age, only more so now that the “perfect face” and the “perfect body” can be bought via costly cosmetic procedures and enhanced by social media filters.
On the runway, Prada and Simons set out to poke holes in the notion of feminine perfection. They did it by “rescaling” little black dresses, eliminating every last bit of their slink until they looked like ’60s sheaths gone wrong. By designing skirts with paper-bag waists that wiped away any sense of an hourglass shape, and by working with materials that leaned thick and coarse, not supple—not “touch me” fabrics, but their opposite, as in “don’t!” Seams were exposed, edges were left raw and unfinished, and wrinkles were pressed into garments, hinting at years of wear. Or, au contraire, maybe the rumples were the result of a proverbial roll in the hay, as the models’ bedroom hair would seem to have suggested.
Exposing clichés is written into the brand source code here, and Prada is famous for pronouncing that “ugly is exciting,” but she and Simons tapped into something potent in their examination of femininity and its discontents, a subject that’s bubbling up in other parts of the culture, as well. By all accounts, Demi Moore is about to scoop up a Best Actress Oscar for The Substance for playing a mid-career actress who chooses an injectable that turns her into an actual monster over aging naturally, the job prospects of a 50-something star being so slim. And in Nightbitch, the demands of full-time motherhood transform Amy Adams’s character into a dog.
“Within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there are lots of restrictions of the body—here, it’s free.” Simons said. That didn’t just apply to what we’d consider the non-sexy shapes of the floral print house dresses or the coats with man-size shoulders. Fur chubbies worn with pumps and nothing else are liberating in a different kind way, and sexy plain-and-simple. Other more subtle details, like the way split collars dipped below the nape of the neck, seemed to have been made strictly for the wearer’s own pleasure. But it’s the non-sexiness of the shapeless dresses that made the strongest point in this show. To dare to wear clothes that don’t stay inside the proscribed lines of femininity is, in its own small way, like flipping the bird at the system, and that feels right. As Prada said herself, “We just talk about which clothes make sense now.”
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