The simplicity with a complexity of Prada's SS21 collection

After an uninspiring London edition and a French one with decidedly superior results, Digital Fashion Week finally arrived in Milan. One of the first brands to present its SS21 collection was Prada, which named its show Multiple Visions. Instead of relying on a single perspective, Prada's brand identity is broken down through the prism of digital and interpreted by five different creators through five different video-chapters that make up the presentation. Terence Nance, Joanna Piotrowska, Martine Syms, Juergen Teller and Willy Vanderperre have each offered their unique creative perspective to represent one of the aspects of Prada's new collection.  

The show begins with a series of men's tailored suits with a slender and precise masculine silhouette, as the looks continue, innovative uses of the classic Prada nylon and elastic technical materials coupled with the classic sartorial uniform appear. In women's looks, on the other hand, the protagonists are volumes and couture treatments of materials – which elevate the simplicity of garments to pure conceptual design. The combination of different meanings and purposes is reflected in the classic techniques by which industrial garments are reworked while the influences of Linea Rossa's sportswear are applied instead to leathers, cottons and taffeta. Along with the concept of form that follows the function, in response to an external world dominated by chaos, the streamlining and simplification of style also looks at the idea of vulnerability, fragility and humanity – characteristics represented at the level of materials and colors by meshes, light fabrics and soft colors. More than pure simplicity, we should talk about aesthetic purity, in direct opposition to any unnecessary complexity. The real complexity sought by this collection is the balance between rigour and dynamism, past and future, density and lightness.

The multiplication of the perspective put in place by the five creatives, then, who have created their own content using the Fondazione Prada as a location in all its versatility and its many souls, wants to overturn the traditional concept of the traditional fashion show: on the one hand the five separate perspectives represent the various positions (both physical and ideological) of the observers of a traditional show, but on the other hand, the membership of all five chapters on the same aesthetic horizon, despite their own aesthetic differences, brings back the diversity of points of view in the same direction. Ideally, therefore, the project would also like to symbolize the union of a community composed of different voices and personalities at a time in history when communities cannot come together. 

The collection itself stands out among Prada's recent minimalism: in the words that accompany the digital presentation "as times become increasingly complex, clothes become straightforward". The similarity of this digital catwalk with the famous SS99 collection, the one in which the aesthetics of Linea Rossa appeared for the first time in a fashion show, is very significant – as is significant the search for a clothing that acts as a "tool" for the everyday life. In this sense, the mixture of sports aesthetics and formal construction represents another multiplicity of the Prada identity that finds corresponding in the multiplicity of creative interpretations with which it is presented.