PRADA FW 2021 MENSWEAR: POSSIBLE FEELINGS
DENIZ AKKAYA
The Prada Fall/Winter 2021 Menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons takes as its basis an intimate and personal wish for contact, our urge to exchange and relate. The entire show was an ode to human feelings, reflecting what’s happening around all of us right now.
The show took place in multiple rooms. As Raf and Miuccia mentioned in the interview with students that took place after the show; the space for the show represented neither outside nor inside or the nature. The space represented “inside of a bubble”, a place full of feelings and sensuality.
The collection’s foundation was the individual: the human body and its freedom. The need to feel, the pleasure of tactility, resulted in a panoply of surface texture and textile. Echoing the notion of sensory stimulation, geometric-patterned jacquard knits and leathers were combined with re-nylon, bouclé tweeds and classic pinstripe wool suiting, in both traditional and unanticipated colors. The interplay was projected outwards, to the sequence of rooms the models navigated through the show. Each room excited a different sense of human emotion. It allowed absolute freedom of interpretation and expression. As Raf told in the interview, “the collection is very connected to our personal feelings and how we feel about what’s going on in the world. So, architecture of the space was particularly important.”
Another doublespeak was reflected in the depiction of the body itself through clothes reduced, minimalized in structure. The message was to return to the body: jacquard-knit bodysuits looked like a “second skin”, placing an emphasis on physicality, but also covering the form.
When one student asked, could fashion perform through which we witness countless creation of our identities? Both designers answered in a way that sums up this entire collection and the brand’s attitude towards the “new normal”, “We still like to express different aspects what clothing mean to a human being. This collection represents phsical feeling clothes can have. Softness and hardness. Expressing the reality of the World.”
