Prada In Belle De Boria, By Rem Koolhaas

twisted bourgeois

Prada aw 10 - In a nod to Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria, Prada and her collaborator, Rem Koolhaas, envisaged a set that was “an abstraction of a city,” made up of spaces such as a surreal beauty parlour, a music hall made from pink foam, and a “street” strewn with meaningless data. Into this strange world walked an equally strange figure: the Prada woman. Recalling the demureness of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour, this season she was in the guise of a conservative, sixties housewife, with her immaculate beehive, knee-length dresses, and patent loafers. Yet, nothing here was as it seemed. Looking closely, those dresses, with their frilly bustiers and outdated prints, became repellently prim—as did knitted stockings and

With the show space resembling a laboratory—albeit one decorated in pale green and pink—the clothes appeared to have been thought up by some terribly chic scientist, as they featured impossibly smooth, icing-like fabrics; tweed prints; diagrammatic floral brooches; and reds, blues, and green that looked beyond the abilities of any Italian artisan. Yet, while Prada created this sense of unreal ugliness, it was underscored by a natural prettiness. Those impossible fabrics were actually double-faced jersey, real tweed was mixed with the printed, and those colours were offset by same delicate pastels found on the

As a feminist and woman whose work is inherently political, Prada is no exception to this, as was revealed in this show. Removed of all romance, the collection unfolded across a sharply lit, raised catwalk that was surrounded by murals made by various women cartoonists from Italy, Japan, and America. Mirroring the cartoonists’ statements—their work included depictions of assertive, independent women and feminist protest—Prada’s clothes emanated an intelligent toughness, as conveyed by the use of raw screen printing on tailored pieces, the use of heavy tweeds and ferocious animal prints, and by arachnid-like sunglasses. Female spiders eat the