Six months since the last fashion week shows were held in front of an audience and after a week of streamed couture and men’s shows in Paris, there was somewhat of a digital hangover at Milan fashion week.
“Can we go back to real shows now?” was the plea from one of those with a compromised posture and dry eyes from squinting at a tiny computer screen as Miuccia Prada got Milan under way with a series of five videos, subtitled: “The Show that Never Happened”.
Prada was presenting her final solo collection before the designer Raf Simons joins in September as co-creative director to show the spring/summer 2021 womenswear collection.
Viewers saw the spring/summer 2020 men’s collection (and the women’s resort collection) via video: one collection but as seen through the lenses of five creatives (Juergen Teller and Willy Vanderperre included) in separate “chapters”.
Of the five films, by the Polish photographer Joanna Piotrowska, stood out. She managed to elegantly balance an artfully made short film (models doing finger-clicking interpretive dancing, around a Twin Peaks-ish stage curtain) with a good showcase of the collection.
Helpfully, the films did not distract from the clothes. For the menswear, Prada kept to last season’s utilitarian vibes: trousers cut with straight precision, paper-crisp white shirts, ties that erred on the side of skinny and sylph-like crossbody bags.
The men’s collection had an almost eerie feeling: occasionally recalling the exactness of the costumes in the 1997 dystopic sci-fi film Gattaca. The womenswear was noticeably freer: dresses cut in tiered and bubble shapes, coats with bat sleeves and peaked Mary Jane shoes.
In an age of fashion austerity, with its focus on the minimal and functional, it felt perfectly judged.
Miuccia Prada herself appeared briefly at the end of Terence Nance’s closing film, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her glimpse through a doorway. As a swansong to this era of Prada it was gentle, subtle and sort of perfect.
But it wasn’t as if this “digital era” hasn’t provided any highlights. Kim Jones’s collaboration with Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo for Dior was an authentic celebration of Black Lives Matter, Casablanca oozed with summery fun, Viktor and Rolf’s couture show – heavy with witty postmodernism – played like a Fast Show sketch, while Jonathan Anderon’s show-in-a-box for Loewe was predictably brilliant and inventive. And of course Prada. But too many played like trailers to the main event. Which they sort of were.
A sense of lack pervaded the proceedings: a lack of curation within the medium, a lack of nervous energy that propels that “anything could happen” energy in the live show and a lack of actually being able to see the clothes. Obscuring the collections behind obtuse and artful intent felt more like you were watching a confusing Tumblr page of an overzealous art student.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel: Milan fashion week returns to physical shows on Wednesday with Dolce and Gabbana (live models! Real clothes! Problematic references!) and London fashion week has announced physical shows will begin again in September.
