Prada FW18: when utility, performance and comfort become subversive

After years of show at its headquarters in via Fogazzaro, Prada moves into a real warehouse of the maison in viale Ortles, on the southern outskirts of Milan where the famous Foundation also stands.

This place, set up like an imaginary warehouse, with trunks and boxes with dreamlike and surreal symbols like roosters or dinosaurs,

"...inspired the show and vice versa...corresponds to the industrial soul of Prada, which we wanted to enhance" says Miuccia Prada.

Observing the FW18 collection, it is easy to understand what the designer intends and how the new sophisticated and rigorous elegance rests on the concepts of utility, performance, comfort and a personal reinterpretation of the Black Nylon. To interpret this material that recalls the Prada of the '90s, four internationally renowned architects and designers come to work on a unique product: Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec on a briefcase, Konstantin Grcic on an apron, Herzog & de Meuron on a dress and Rem Koolhaas on a backpack.

Timeless, practical and unusually precious, nylon is the main element called to subvert the bourgeois male habit, but not only. And, together with other natural fabrics, it invades all the 45 garments of the collection: Anorak, padded coats and others so thin as to look like shirts, camel wool dressing gowns, jacquard polo shirts, Bermuda shorts, trousers, wide skater sweatshirts, shirts printed.

Just the prints are the other unexpected detail, the link with the heritage and the past of Prada that dusts off some of its most iconic graphics, now remixed ad hoc, from bananas to chrysanthemums, from flames to Cleopatra.