As fashion is delving into the
great gender blur, Miuccia Prada dived head down into a quest
for lost femininity in her fall-winter 2015 collection debuted
Thursday in Milan.
And while the deliberate erosion of a once rigid
demarcation between men's and women's wear continues to dominate
catwalks, Prada showcased pastel colours with a strong
predominance of pink styled with ladylike gloves, dress coats
and empire-line dresses decorated with bows.
The coats, backless tops and gowns had a modern take on the
1960s silhouette.
There were also plenty of Prada quotes - the Mary Janes,
the rubbery boots with contrasting soles and the daring colour
combinations.
Suits with cropped pants and dainty jackets, fur stoles,
brooches and hair clips in a flower motif as well as kitten
heels completed the "variation on beauty" described in the show
notes.
Such femininity at times bordered on the "surreal" - a
"genetically modified" brand of beauty which was very much about
women's fantasies as it was about their everyday life.
This ironic play on "real and fake" - on the "cliché of
what women want" - was the storyline behind the designer's
unexpected U-turn into women's-only territory after a men's wear
presentation last month which featured both male and female
models in interchangeable looks.
January's debut was described as "the first part" of the
fall-winter 2015 show.
And the heightened femininity showcased on Thursday
followed traditional aesthetic guidelines while playing with
unusual fabrics to explore both ends of the real-fake spectrum.
Doubled-faced jerseys looked like neoprene, ostrich leather
blended into printed fabric, making it impossible to discern
which was which.
Tweeds were woven and patterned with a digital print of a
molecule - adding a futuristic taste to the whole ensemble.
Meanwhile, a soundtrack from Walt Disney's Fantasia
reminded viewers how artifice can lead to utter beauty - like
Prada's 'pretend' coat without sleeves, the fake dress slips or
fake bows, which were all optical illusions, much like the
collection's classicism.
And while Prada toyed with womanliness, Karl Lagerfeld at
Fendi moved away from the femininity of the house's spring
offering with a streamlined, sophisticated assertiveness evoked
through avant-garde Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943).
The hallmark of Taeuber-Arp's art was the superb simplicity
of design most often attained through the use of pure
geometrical forms.
The artist's geometrical abstraction melded into the Fendi
style through colour blocking and a play on geometry seen, among
others, in the all-white dresses constructed with leather panels
inspired by the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, the masterpiece
of Fascist architecture that has just become Fendi's
headquarters in Rome.
Panels fashioned the legs of models, their feet clad in fur
wedge boots.
Statement coats were tied at the waist to provide
high-impact A-line flare and were styled with fur clutches with
bird-of-paradise flowers symbolizing the nobility of women, said
Silvia Venturini Fendi, Lagerfeld's co-designer at the Roman
luxury leather-goods company.
The image of sophisticated purity envisioned through
Taeuber-Arp, whose abstracts were also used as prints in the
collection, also turned into pants with mink hems, white shirts
with leather and fur waistcoats, pony-hair and sheepskin
dresses.
The streamlined silhouettes of clothes played for contrast
with the oversized outerwear - the coats, furs and
geometrically-printed down jackets - in the shades beloved by
Taeuber-Arp, like burgundy and rust.
Overall, the collection had a sharp deluxe quality that
stood out on its own, a reminder of the unique aesthetic Fendi
elaborates season after season - much like Taeuber-Arp's
paintings, which are a testament to her art alone with little
trace of artistic influences sweeping through Europe at the
time.
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