An instinctive attraction to history. The Fall/Winter 2024 Prada collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons embeds fashion with fragments of histories, in an exploration of notions of beauty, of a contemporary world formed by memories. There is a romance, with the past.

A knowledge of history not only informs the contemporaneous, but defines it – clothes are referent to different eras, other times, synchronous echoes recontextualized. The past is an instrument, a tool for learning, used here to try to invent something new. Yet rather than an intellectual examination, this collection is an emotional reaction, to ideals of beauty that still feel resonant.

Antecedents literally fashion the present. Stereotypical garments of today - biker jackets, bomber jackets, knitwear – are shaped by elements drawn from history, changing line and detail. The concept of fragments is literally reflected through elements embedded within other clothes, and in pieces carved out around the body, peeled away to expose inner layers. Skirts form a façade of fabric, contrasts of delicacy and strength, fragile silk laid against tailoring wool.

The silhouette is narrow, attenuated with an exaggerated verticality. Shoes and hats push proportion to extreme, while clothes embrace the body in a direct expression of the feminine. In turn, gestural qualities of the feminine become inherent: handbags are suspended, sunglasses echo maquillage. Ways of being become structures of making, the intangible traces of human lives made concrete.

Form language can be shifted through materialization, refabrication altering perception. Traditionally masculine materials are reworked into the intrinsically feminine. And clichés of femininity – bows, frills, ruffles – are reconsidered, their meaning fundamentally reassessed. Why do they persist? Why do they attract?

Positing questions, engaging responses, the fashion show is the initiation of a conversation with the world, an exchange of ideas. This instinct, this desire to communicate and express, is a fundamental human impulse – to touch one another, to express feeling, through the clothes we wear.