Prada’s SS’24 Collection Brings Fluid Shapes to MFW Runway
The perfect balance of form and function creates a unique wearable experience, redefining menswear standards.
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2024 menswear collection debuted at Milan Fashion Week, with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons returning with an ever-so-sleek and viscous idea for the season. In collaboration with Raf Simons, Mrs. Prada injected a sense of fantasy and reinvented the relationship between rigid structures and dynamic elements. On a canvas that was less of a runway and more of an avant-garde exhibition space flanked by green curtains, the collection was presented with an unconventional theatricality that left the audience mesmerized.
In a corrugated steel-clad room in the Fondazione Prada warehouse, the soundtrack of “Closer” and Nine Inch Nails’ “I Want To Fuck You Like An Animal” hadn’t even started when the crowd was already speechless as it bounced off the walls before drool descended from the ceilings. The name of the collection, “Fluid Form,” made sense. And in true Raf and Miuccia tradition, the runway show wasn’t just a gimmick, it complemented the collection and everything it stood for.
Dutch studio AMO created an aluminium-clad space with slime falling from the ceiling to form liquid walls for the Prada fashion house’s Spring Summer 2024 menswear show. Located in the Deposito space at the brand’s Rem Koolhaas-designed Fondazione Prada art centre in Milan, AMO clad the walls, floor, and suspended ceiling in aluminium to create a cage-like structure for the show. The rigid lines of the silhouettes of the looks on the runway contrasted with the slime that composed abstract walls and fluid interruptions in constant motion. This reflected the common state of the constantly changing person and the dynamic passage of time.
By creating constantly changing “walls” of slime, AMO’s design aimed to change the perception of the industrial space, adding an organic look that would also affect the way the audience viewed and interacted with the models.
Ms. Prada later said, “Now, at this moment, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas.” Together, she and Raf Simons dressed their spring 2024 men in suits that echoed the relationship between that rigid runway mesh and the shimmering plasma that sprang from and through it. Simons said this silhouette was meant to echo the heroically enhanced sartorial paradigm of the 1940s.
For SS24, Prada and Simons explored what they called “an absolute freedom of the body,” taking closet staples and giving them some unique elements such as florals, pockets or elongated sleeves. “We were thinking a lot about the body, about giving freedom to the body, even if our interest is to show references to archetypes and architecture in fashion, which is often restrictive. So we applied the structure to a whole spectrum of men’s garments, giving them lightness, ease and comfort.”
In this fashion show we could see floral shirts with ruffles, traditional shirts that transform into full-length coats, denim jeans, work vests with several functional pockets, fine-gauge knit shirts in navy blue, faux fur vests, and so on.
Inspired by renowned artists, such as the influence of HR Giger, the creator of Alien and Joseph Beuys. The incorporation of light but heavy-looking materials paid homage to Beuys, while the architectural inspirations echoed Giger’s fantastic creations. The shape of the three-button Beuys jacket was transformed from a tailored piece into what most resembled a sailing parka, cut from technical nylon and then rugged leather. Toward the end, the pockets and flowers were mixed and matched into a shirt; the pockets were built into the shirt and the flowers, like painted resin ornaments, sprouted from them.
On the other hand, they blurred and disguised the flashy floral decorations on Hawaiian shirts by adding epaulettes, patterned fringe panels or three-dimensional origami flowers.
Pockets were another big story. “Rather than utilitarian, we saw them as three-dimensional decorations,” Prada explained backstage. The puffy pockets were tacked to shirt sleeves as badges and coagulated into multiples on the front of utility shirts and vests, sometimes along with D-rings.
Five-pocket jeans, denim shirts with removable shoulder pads, and men’s shorts with partially elasticized waists were among the most accessible items in this excellent collection, which had a youthful feel.
“The shirt is a starting point, its structure and details are borrowed as a basis for transforming a whole stable of menswear: suits, raincoats, active sportswear, reporter jackets. Reconsidered, reconstructed construction. Starting from simplicity, the collection proposes a notion of expansion, amplification of an idea, a paradox between silhouette and materiality. The ultimate goal is a constant awareness of the inner body and its liberation.” – By Prada.
The ultimate goal was freedom: freedom of the body and, also, freedom of design. By eschewing convention in creating their traditional tailoring, Prada and Simons created something truly free, modern and perhaps even new. Overall, Prada SS24 was a play on making formality more than its designated codes.
Take a closer look at the Prada Spring 2024 Menswear collection, below:
