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The day before the US presidential inauguration, it was impossible for Miuccia Prada to avoid the question. When designing her collection, just how much was fashion’s most radical intellectual thinking about Donald Trump?
Speaking backstage at her show on the opening weekend of men’s fashion week in Milan, the 75-year-old designer, who grew up a communist and believed, like many of her generation, that change would come not through capitalism but through revolution, could only laugh. “Is it an answer to what is happening? Yes,” she said. “The world has become conservative.” As for the clothes, it wasn’t so much an autumn/winter 2025 collection as a riposte to “the first season of artificial intelligence”.
Speaking with her co-creative director Raf Simons, by their shared admission it was a challenging collection for challenging times. There were cream pyjamas made from buttery soft leather, bright puffer jackets layered upon puffer jackets, and oversized hoods in granny-curtain fabric. If the clothes and the fabrics looked incongruous, that was deliberate – they were trying to resist the algorithm.
“These are things that shouldn’t be together, coming together,” said Simons. For example, he added, the men wore jewellery but sometimes the jewellery dangled from the crew-necked jumpers or lapels. Some of them wore traditional-style cowboy boots, but more than half had bare chests. Office-friendly slacks in dark grey were paired with faux-fur tabards (Prada is fur-free), “modern man meets primal”, Simons said. Even the buckled bags, which looked battered and vintage, were held the wrong way round. Dotted wittily throughout were pyjamas worn under coats, the sort of thing you might wear for a late milk run. “When I get home, I just take it all off [and get into pyjamas],” said Simons, exhaling.
The overall effect was clothes cut to perfection but styled in an unpredictable way that seemed to resist trends and seasons. For every double puffer jacket or faux-cowhide sweater, there was a short-sleeve summer shirt and an oiled chest.
Even the set was “a reaction to what a set usually is”, Simons said. Models walked on two levels of unfinished scaffolding to Rossini’s La gazza ladra. Beneath their feet was a swirling blue art nouveau carpet. The lighting was both low and bright, “cinematic” said film-loving Simons, who acknowledged that the late David Lynch was an influence.
Family-owned Prada has emerged as one of the rare winners amid a global luxury sector downturn. Routinely described as the hottest brand in the world by customers, critics and the fashion search site Lyst, Miuccia is probably the most innovative fashion designer of her generation. In 1975 she took over the family’s leather goods company. Two years later she met her future husband, Patrizio Bertelli, then running a leather goods factory, who is now chair of the Prada Group. One of the few brands not owned by a conglomerate, in 2022 the company’s annual revenue was $4.5bn. There is talk even that the Prada group will buy Versace.
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Miuccia is not one to talk business, though. As someone who prefers to communicate through her clothes, she has consistently tried to address and react to the times, all while reconciling her artistic, leftist roots with what others might find frivolous: high fashion. So it should not be a surprise that the threat of AI and rise of fascism was on her mind. “Everyone wants designers to be revolutionary,” she added, with light despair. “But what is happening in the world? That is horrible.”
