What’s in a Skirt? Prada SS27 Womenswear
Words by Lynn Mathuthu
Prada Womenswear SS27. Photo by Daniele Venturelli.
“I think of a skirt the same way some people think of a T-shirt—a place to express what I think.”
Prada Spring/Summer 2027 served 63 looks: no pants, no dresses, just a revolving door of skirts. When I think of Prada, my mind is immediately flooded with images of Charlotte York’s famous “lipstick” skirt from Spring/Summer 2000, the holy-grail mirror skirt from Spring/Summer 1999, and the gold suit-skirt from Spring/Summer 2009. The skirt has long been synonymous with Prada, and for Miuccia Prada, it has become a language in itself; a way of communicating ideas through clothes.
Where other brands might turn to slogan T-shirts, emblazoned with declarations such as “we should all be feminists,” Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons communicate through the garment itself. Their ideas are embedded within the construction, fabrication, and repetition of a familiar form, rather than printed across its surface. The result is a collection that asks how much meaning can be extracted from something we already know.
The show opened with a red, A-line, knee-length pencil skirt, paired with a black bralette and a simple black pump. The silhouette became a recurring motif throughout the collection, but was continually transformed through material and texture: recycled pleated nylon, cotton treated to resemble leather and suede, and jewellery embellished with crystals, scattered across the looks. The structure remained familiar, its surroundings shifted.
Prada Womenswear SS27. Photo by Daniele Venturelli.
This theme of recognition and reinvention extended into the accessories. Prada and Simons referenced their own work by recreating the anisometropic eyewear from the men’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, producing a visual dialogue between the two shows. Rather than existing as separate collections, they seemed to speak to one another; different iterations of the same conversation.
What stayed with me most was this idea of reviving what already exists. Prada and Simons seem less interested in creating something entirely new than in asking what else a familiar thing can become. How many forms can a known object assume? How many possibilities can exist within a single silhouette? And how many times can something be reinterpreted before we begin to see it differently?
Perhaps this is what makes the skirt so distinctly Prada. It is not simply a garment, but a framework for thought. Season after season, the same familiar object is taken apart, reconstructed, distorted, and made new again. In Spring/Summer 2027, Prada asks us to look at what we already have and consider how much possibility might still be hiding within it.
Prada Womenswear SS27. Photo by Daniele Venturelli.