Why Prada was the only leading brand at Milan Men's Fashion Week FW19?

Miuccia Prada, a designer so influential that if she immerses even the tip of the foot in the water of a new trend, the proverbial chain effect is perceived on all sides of the pond.

As already discussed in the previous post, Milano Moda Uomo, didn’t left any kind of mark.

Why? Because many fashion houses choose to ignore what is really happening in the world, offering jumble of fantasies and colors, rather than telling the sadness of the reality that surrounds us.

Rome burns and we only think about wearing animal prints, oversized clothes and sneakers. This makes me compare Off-White™ with Dior when this last brand, in 1947, period of strong rationing and shortage of the post-war period, proposed generous clothes, pretending that everything was going well.

Miuccia Prada, on the contrary, chooses not to dream, but to face the reality and reflect it in the clothes she creates offering a kind of product that will then be the testimony of her time, “against the complications, the harshness, the wickedness of the world”, as declares herself.

Why did she succeed?

Because true fashion is not just a trend, it’s not just a market. It is the pure and simple expression of ourself, in a good or a bad way. And for sure, Prada didn’t forget it. Indeed, let’s say that with the Fall/Winter 2019 Men’s show, she wanted us to remind it.

FRANKENSTEIN

Are men really monsters? Apparently yes.

Several millennia of human civilization say that they offer sufficient evidence. And recent history provides its own contemporary gloss on the situation. It is not simply that men are monsters, they act like monsters.

“The Man is a Monster with a Big Heart.” – Miuccia Prada

Beyond the simple presentation of the outfits of which you can read an excellent review here, this show comes from the need to tell who is the man of today. A man who is dressed exactly as he would like to appear, but who can not express who he really is is deep within.

His mood, in fact, has considerably darkened in recent seasons. The culture that loves is denigrated as elitist and intelligent and rational thinking is perpetually under attack by political populism. In reality, however, no one expected that such an idea was the tread during a fashion week that is only well intentioned to offer clothes that men might want to wear.

But Miuccia Prada, long known for offering ambiguous interpretations of modern masculinity, rightly recognizes that today it is difficult to translate what is happening around us without seeming pretentious. She must pay close attention to what she says.

Hence the need to take charge of expressing a concept that we all think, but with which nobody really wants to deal, the HORROR.
Because the feeling of horror is much deeper than the trash, and it is clear from her work that Miuccia’s real interest was to bring Mary Godwin to the forefront, the one who wrote the original story of Frankenstein. Wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, friend of Lord Byron, this extraordinary woman was at the center of the romantic movement of the time, but she was forced to publish so anonymously that people thought it was her husband’s job.

Unlike the writer, however, Miuccia Prada is a woman who does not need to hide and who fights every day to make her voice heard.
The social and political commentary that she has always explored through her work has made it one of the most revered figures in the sector, so much so as to provoke invitations to enter the world of politics.

As we have already said for Prada, clothes can speak louder than words, so throughout the collection she mobilizes her troop of men animated by a strong military vein.

The rigorous and compact suits were adorned with belts so close as to want to contain that anger that is so hard to emerge, as they walk straight on their way under the notes of Timewarp, Dance Macabre, followed by Marilyn Manson‘s version of “Tainted Love “, where it was clear that the contamination had turned into a terminal illness. Godwin’s revenge.

Dark days, yes. But at the end of the show two guys arrive wearing sweaters inlaid with lightning, each with a pink heart pinned to his chest by a safety pin.

“I have a safety pin in my heart for you”, sang the punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald in 1977. “I do not love you for your cemetery eyes, I do not love you for your shaved thighs, but I love you for that beat-beat of yours -beat-beat-beat. ”

Because in the end, there is only a desire for love, however monstrous you are.

Posted By

Francesca Montuschi

Trendsetter sin dai tempi dell'asilo (già allora decidevo i miei outfit). Giornalista di moda, sempre alla ricerca di nuove tendenze, ma nostalgica dell'eleganza del passato.