The power of reality, in a world of the imaginary. The Prada Spring/Summer 2025 menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons offers a discourse around contemporary notions of truth and pretence, the real and unreal. Here, we are encouraged to question the actuality of what we perceive, to reconsider, to look at things closer.

Closeness reflects emotion - the human urge for proximity, to share space and commune. To be closer also shifts perception. Viewed from afar, pieces can pretend to be other - details may seem simplistic, naïve, but up-close, physically, perceptions transform. Clothes with wired details animate collars and hems with an unreal dynamism, as if alive themselves. Purposefully creased, patinated, aged, garments bear traces of time - imperfection another sign of living, of reality.

Pieces stolen from father or mother sit differently on the body. Exaggerated proportions, deliberately long or cropped, are instinctively combined - a superhero sweater transposed to a new context. Bernard Buffet paintings appear, printed like a concert t-shirt. Items from different origins are juxtaposed in unanticipated contrasts, but with consideration, a deliberate and careful spontaneity.

There is a spirit of freedom, of youthful optimism and energy. In a fairytale ravescape invented within the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada, people are brought together. A hut, the simplest structure, stands nearby as a totem of the essential, the necessary, the real, reflected in clothes that are uncontrived and direct. A utopian conceit, here the imaginary can propose a new reality.