By creating stunning, gorgeous renditions of employees' uniforms, which they characterized as "sartorial depictions of the beauty of care, of love, of reality... of responsibility,” Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, claimed they sought to "give weight to genuine jobs." Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons' Fall/Winter 2023 collection reexamines, rethinks, and ultimately rediscovers notions of beauty. In this case, action, not aesthetics, determines beauty. Clothes serve as symbols and representations of the beauty that comes from caring, love, and reality.
Through a redress of purpose, a significance is afforded to clothing that expresses these fundamental values. Uniforms are sartorial representations of care and responsibility, transformed utilizing the aesthetic language of eveningwear. Wedding dresses, symbols of love, become everyday attire, their skirts proposed with sweaters as a new form of quotidian dress. This exchange, between the notion of the everyday and occasion wear, the familiar and the exceptional, gives a different importance to both.
Protection of the body through clothing suggests a tender concern, safekeeping. Cocooning volumes re-shape classic tailored outerwear, proposed from the male wardrobe; down padding safeguards, warms. Leather and suede pieces draw inspiration from protective clothing. Flowers, tokens of affection, are simultaneously evocative of the craft of fashion, another gesture of care.
A notion of transformation extends to the space of the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada, where a moving ceiling - a reiteration of the décor of the January menswear show - reengineers dimensions, alternatively amplifying and reducing the room. The process uncovers floral decoration, previously concealed within the industrial form - their revelation prompts another reconsideration of both space and the figures that move within, a new point of view.
