Prada’s Coherent Chaos
Anders Christian Madsen reviews the Prada Spring/Summer 2026 collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons.
A sense of childlike dressing is starting to take form on the runways this season. Rather than a naive approach to dressing, it reflects the sense of freedom we experience during our formative years of discovering clothes and style. The Prada collection, presented on a bright orange floor at the Fondazione, felt a lot like a child’s uninhibited dress-up session: clothes of every genre freely thrown on, tucked in, and accessorized on one giant whim.
“We talked a lot about the idea of freedom and what we think about when we dress,” Raf Simons said backstage, flanked by Miuccia Prada. “We think about the past, but we don’t want it to be a relic of the past. One example: hippies; they had this freedom to take whatever they wanted, like a flower dress with an army jacket. We’re trying to think in this sense, that a woman can feel amazing and free and chic and luxurious in a uniform as much as a dress.”
Through their exits, Prada and Simons let purified uniforms flow into make-do bras and skirts that looked like they were pieced together from a medley of repurposed cloths. The uniforms morphed into neat mid-century dresses echoed in bowling-shirt-and-dance-skirt silhouettes with languished memories of hosen. Intellectual cardigans were paired with glamorous opera gloves and lacy slip skirts, and magnified toddler’s dresses were worn with sturdy field jackets. There were no rules, just whims.
PRADA
“It’s a composition of pieces we feel naturally attracted to at this moment in time,” Prada said, explaining the impulse-led process that fueled the collection. That in itself was a liberatingly naive approach: cutting away the layers of predetermined thoughts influenced by our surroundings and creating simply from one’s most immediate desires. “Inevitably, when we create, we think about the world around us. The future is unknown,” Prada said.
“This collection is about reacting to the uncertain — clothes that can shift, change, adapt,” she continued. “In the combination of the different elements, in this idea of composition, there is a choice and freedom, authority and agency for the woman wearing them. It is fashion that is connected inherently to the world, with a meaning and usefulness. How to face the world, and how to survive.”
The happy chaos embodied by the Prada collection was symptomatic, well, not just of a chaotic world — duh — but of a time when our preordained senses of order and reactions have been disturbed. Nobody knows how to behave in a society that’s entering a political climate our generation has never experienced before. Our codes and customs have been picked up, thrown into the air, and landed on us, all helter-skelter, like the wardrobe Prada and Simons presented today. If it felt attractive, it’s because we could relate.
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