Standard office attire is not often associated with outdoors gear, aside from a trusty anorak worn over a suit for the commute. Yet in Prada’s autumn/winter menswear collection, shown in Milan on Sunday afternoon, the two were pitched as emphatically non-mutually exclusive.
“We don’t want to think that these are clothes to wear to the office or these are the clothes you wear in nature,” said the company’s co-creative director Raf Simons, who joined Miuccia Prada at the helm in 2020. “We want to try to disturb [the] other and come to something contemporary.”
This idea manifested in sharp suiting and brightly coloured fine knitwear worn alongside all-weather trenches and chunky tweed workwear coats. The outdoors stimuli also took the pair in a maritime direction, with double-breasted sheepskin coats with gold buttons and jacquard caps befitting a ship’s captain.
The famous Prada sets, designed for each show by Rotterdam-based architectural thinktank AMO, played its usual part in the messaging. This season, guests walked through a drab carpeted office space featuring desktop computers in clean-desk-policy office pods, before entering the recycled Perspex catwalk, beneath which was a living forest floor complete with a trickling spring. The seating consisted of oscillating office chairs – the non-ergonomic kind that are bought on bulk order from Staples.
“Most people’s screensavers are nature [as they] sit in these synthetic human-made environments,” said Simons, highlighting the instinctive human need to be attached to nature and the outdoors. In turn, these clothes are designed to respond to “disparate and distinct environments, interior and exterior”, the show notes said. “There is a sense of the outdoors, of the actuality of nature, and direct expression of the desire to go outside, to experience the world.”
While Simons’ and Prada’s explanation of the inspiration behind their collections can sometimes border on the esoteric, this was in fact a collection that did what they said it did, ticking both the indoors and outdoors boxes with broad appeal.
Prada has lately made a point of presenting useful, everyday luxury, and where Prada goes, other brands follow. Functionality, wearability and utility are once again buzzwords in fashion, with fellow luxury houses Fendi, Gucci, and Emporio Armani all presenting wardrobes with these themes over the weekend.
It’s not just earthbound professionals that Prada has in its sights. In October, it announced its collaboration with the Texas-based Axiom Space to design Nasa’s spacesuits for its Artemis III mission – the first crewed flight to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 – which was recently postponed until 2026.
Celebrating its 110th anniversary last year, the Prada Group – which also owns Miu Miu – reported net revenues of €3.3bn (£2.9bn) in the first nine months of 2023, a rise of 17% compared with 2022. Shortly after, it entered the lucrative beauty arena with the launch of Prada makeup and skincare, which it hopes will provide another boost to growth.
