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 foundation of all is the individual: the human body, and its freedom. The need to feel, the pleasure of tactility, results in a panoply of surface, texture and textile.
Following the digital presentation, Prada debuts an intimate online conversation between a selection of students from colleges and universities around the world and co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. Drawn from the fields of fashion, art, design, architecture and philosophy, the students form a diverse cross-section of society today. An evolution of the discussion that concluded the Spring Summer 2021 Dialogues virtual runway show, these conversations reflect the passionate interest of both Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons in the power of education and the vital importance of nurturing the next generation of future creatives.
Educational institutions involved: Tsinghua University, School of Architecture (Beijing, China), Bunka Fashion College (Tokyo, Japan), Hongik University, International Design School for Advanced Studies (Seoul, South Korea), Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Faculty of Philosophy (Milan, Italy), Central Saint Martins (London, UK), Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) and Fashion Institute of Technology, School of Graduate Studies, MFA Fashion Design (New York, NY, USA).
The Collection
Echoing the notion of sensory stimulation, geometric-patterned jacquard knits and leathers are combined with nylon, bouclé tweeds and classic pinstripe wool suiting, in both traditional and unanticipated colors. The logical conclusion is to return to the body: jacquard-knit bodysuits create a streamlined “second skin”, serving to delineate the figure in dynamic movement. Abstraction of feeling becomes abstraction of freedom. These bodysuits paradoxically reveal while concealing, placing an emphasis on physicality, but also covering the form.
Each room excites the senses: backdrops brilliantly-hued, the models’ isolated passages underscored by an original electronic soundtrack by Plastikman aka Richie Hawtin. Devised by Rem Koolhaas and AMO, the show’s ‘non-spaces’ are defined by panes of marble, resin, plaster and faux fur. Inviting and seductive, they can pretend to be both interior and exterior, hard and soft, warm and cold: simultaneously both and neither, they allow absolute freedom of interpretation and expression.
With the ambition of repurposing furnishing used for the Prada Group’s shows, the materials utilized in the set of the Fall/Winter 2021 Menswear digital show will be upcycled, finding a new life after the event through special product installations and pop-ups around the world. Finally, these materials will be donated to Meta, a circular economy project based in Milan.