GRAND ENTRANCE

This season saw designers reimagine glamour, luxury and femininity in subversive style

-  JACK MOSS

An interrogation of femininity has been a part of the Prada project since Miuccia Prada took over the family label in 1978. Her collections have taken the trappings of womanhood and skewed them - handbags and high-heeled shoes, brooches and beehives - each loaded with symbolism and, in her hands, ripe for reinvention. It's been the same with archetypes, too: flapper girls and businesswomen, nurses, brides and Cinecittà sirens, the fastidiously dressed women of the Italian bourgeoisie - all have received the Prada treatment, which is at once intellectual and impulsive. She has spoken of her love of clichés - in these well-worn tropes, Mrs Prada has long seen only possibility: to make the ugly beautiful, and the beautiful ugly, that most Prada of gestures.

'Raw Glamour' was the title given by Mrs Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons to their A/W25 collection for Prada, presented in February amid an imposing multi-level scaffold structure erected by OMA in Fondazione Prada's hangar-like Deposito space in Milan. Here, as models traversed the maze-like show set at speed hair dishevelled, faces stripped of make-up there appeared new urgency to the project.

'We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,' said Mrs Prada, noting that the world was entering 'a very black moment... a difficult time'. 'It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper - oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.' It led the pair to radically rewrite and recontextualise the tropes of glamour. Much of this was done through proportion - the nipped, ladylike contours of 1960s dresses were sized up so they hung off models' bodies or torn away at their edges, almost violently. "The idea of feminine beauty is often about constricting movement, so we wanted these clothes to be about liberation.