Legendary designer Raf Simons announced last year that he would bid farewell to Raf Simons, the fashion brand of the same name, and focus on Prada, which is co-managed with Miuccia Prada. 》is the name to open a dialogue, appealing to ideas, visions and claims of “clothes first” through action.
Prada’s Fall/Winter 2023 menswear collection, co-designed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, is a further exploration of the basics of fashion. It defends its meaning, value and importance that endure to this day.
The invitations to this big show are pillows and pillowcases, which are fully used in this series. The vest and waistcoat are made of white cotton material, which has a futuristic atmosphere of the space age in the 1960s; on multiple sets of Raf Simons’ iconic slim suits , adding ulterior collar designs, using color matching and printing to create variability, and redefining the outline and tailoring of prototype clothing through deconstruction.
In addition, many classic items have been added this season, such as bomber jackets, coats, cardigans, shirts and bags. Clothes are used to explain the perception of reality, and then define the changes in thinking given by time. Clothes seem to be A tool, but it is also a means of expressing enough to define a person.
The simplicity and austerity of modernist codes are combined with their apparent contradictions: comfort, exaggeration, intimacy. Paragons of fashion meet Prada paragons, new garments inherit literal and ideological fragments of heritage, graphic fragments of simplification, tailoring, printing and knitting, leaning on bare skin. Superfluous details are removed from the clothing, wrapping the form in a tactile communication that clings to the naked body. Silhouettes are pronounced, enlarged and reduced, exploring the extremes of haute couture through the construction of garments.
Proportion can shift perception, and the Prada Art Foundation show space designed by AMO exposes the building’s concrete façade. In this stripped-down, raw panorama, dimensions are reworked, radically altered—the ceiling gently rises, transforming the space from privacy to grandeur, changing scale in turn altering our perspective on the garments within. The process echoes the garment itself, elongated or shortened. They demonstrate the reconstruction of meaning and identity through a small movement.
