Prada power scores a victory over Tod’s tassels

While some designers got bogged down in fripperies, others were masters at knowing exactly what women want

Prada at Milan with a chunky key necklace (Reuters)

There’s been an odd mood in Milan this season – in fact, a mood prevalent across the board, possibly generated by a board. A corporate board, I mean. The mood is of desperation, of scrambling around for ideas, for product.

Collections are longer, broader. Less focused and succinct. They offer more, while often surrendering less. There’s more stuff but fewer ideas, more trinkets and gewgaws and fitfully dangling bits and bobs, the pieces often referred to as “entry level” – tassels at Tod’s, charms at Pradas, fur tails at Fendi, Versace and everywhere else. They may be small, but they swing a mighty punch when it comes to bumping up a brand’s bottom line. Because while we may baulk at investing thousands in a coat, if we’re sufficiently enamoured by a label we may shell out a couple of hundred on a piece of tat to hang off our handbag. Or so the thinking goes.

The issue is thus: the key ring and charms and chatelaines (the last have emerged as an odd Milan trend) can be hawked only if they summarise a larger narrative, rather than comprising said narrative in themselves. If the spin-offs have nothing to spin off from, you’re in dire straits.

Let’s discuss collections where this approach worked, and where it did not. First the latter: Tod’s, by Alessandra Facchinetti, whose tenure began strongly, proposing sleek and straightforward separates with intricately worked surfaces, but whose collections strike you as superficial as a result. There’s no real engagement or development of shape, just a piling on of decor.

Here, there was studding, pleating, fringing, topstitching, buckled straps and tassels piled on to a single leather skirt. Decoration felt less an anchor than an albatross. Tod’s has an expert hand with leather; if only Facchinetti’s own hand were half as certain. As it is, she gets distracted by the techniques at her disposal and winds up bogged down in a morass of technique that feels more suitable for hanging on a wall than on your body. A wall, at least, could easily bear the weight.

Facchinetti’s failure was in disregarding the woman who is eventually supposed to end up inside her clothes. Tomas Maier’s success in his Bottega Veneta collection – one of his best – was that he focused almost purely on their needs. “That’s why we make clothes,” he reasons. “It’s not for show; it’s for people. I am always thinking about them, and what works for their lives.” What works are clothes like these: narrow suits and swinging coats with sequins embedded in the surface and easy narrow dresses. There was lots of knitwear, and a summery sequence around the middle of tank tops and pleated skirts with flat shoes that seemed oddly Roman Holiday for a winter collection.


 A quartet of Prada dresses 
 (EPA)

Maier lives in Florida, in the climate-controlled environs favoured by the wealthy where summer is perpetual. The climate of wealth. Why wouldn’t they want summer dresses in the winter time? Just crank up the heating. Equally, why wouldn’t they want a checked coat worked not in wool nor even cashmere, but a king’s ransom of chartreuse lamb with intarsia layers and karung skin? No matter if they live in Miami or the Middle East, they can just crank up the air con. I guess this show was about women’s wants rather than women’s needs, but the garments managed to ignite a lust altogether too rare today.

Miuccia Prada often muses on what women want. In fact, it’s mostly about what she wants – what she wants to wear, sure (she always wears Prada, or maybe Miu Miu, which she’ll show in Paris in just over a week’s time), but also what she wants to say. The winter collection she presented on late on 25 February was familiar to those who saw her menswear show (punctuated with her pre-autumn womenswear) on the same catwalk back in January. Mrs Prada explored similar ideas, similar aesthetics, in the same set at the Via Fogazzaro. “I could do a much deeper job,” she said backstage, of the rare decision to repeat herself from a designer known as a master of the volte-face. “A woman has many more facets … and I am a woman, so …” She smiled.

It’s interesting to think of this Prada show as a remix, a repositioning of her predominantly menswear January show, refracted through a feminine prism. Take the set, a plywood rendering of the kind of town square used for ceremonies – both good and bad. The menswear referenced the “auto-da-fé” – the Spanish Inquisition’s burning of heretics at the stake. The womenswear made me think of Salem’s witch trials, the torching of Jeanne d’Arc. The power of the power of women, and frequently the fear it arouses.


 Models in Tod’s creations during a show at the PAC art museum 
 (EPA)

Many of Prada’s models wore notebooks fastened to their necks or handbags, bound in metal and tightly buckled like teenage diaries, baubles, books of secrets or spells. Mrs Prada wryly commented that she had never written anything in her life, which for a former political science PhD student strikes you as slightly disingenuous. Some of those notebooks were attached to metallic roses – fragile, but strong. And the corset, a feminine garment viewed as empowering and subjugating in equal measure, was buckled on the outside of many of the garments.

There’s a fascinating thing at Prada, a label helmed by a formidably powerful woman, a true matriarch. The menswear is often vulnerable, fragile – for boys, rather than for men. The womenswear is about strength, and seldom about borrowing from the male idiom – trouser suits, say, or tailored coats – to assert said strength. There’s a strength in seduction: the sailor hats slanted across many looks were certainly seductive. Mrs Prada said these were inspired by a friend who arrived to see her in the mountains during the summer. “They’re a symbol of travelling,” she mused. “Of sex, and danger.”


 Bottega Veneta on the Milan catwalk 
 (Getty)

There’s a danger in a powerful woman, in a woman in control of her sexuality and also of her wallet. Incidentally, those omnipresent chatelaines – which hung out on the Prada catwalk too, some even with decorative keys attached – were symbolic of the status of the women sporting them in their original context of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their 21st-century equivalents will find plenty of things at Prada to fulfil their needs, but tapping into the all-important want is what Miuccia Prada is intuitively astute at.

Accordingly, a duo of handbags – named the Pionnière and Cahier (the later a notebook shape style, like all those diaries) – were available immediately after the show. You may want them enough to convince yourself you need them. Music to any luxury goods merchant. Even one as storied as Mrs Prada.