At Prada, the Clarity of a Single – and Singular – Idea

For Spring/Summer 2027, a sharp focus on jeans – “the most universal garment” – proposed an aggressively narrow silhouette. Alexander Fury talks to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons backstage

Clarity was a word Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were obsessed with, for their Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show. Add to that concentration, reiteration, and decision. That much was plain as the outfits came bolting out into a vast neon whiteness, a literal blank canvas cut through with sharp, vertical silhouettes of slim jeans, skinny jackets, clinging T-shirts. “No useless design,” declared Miuccia Prada, a statement that has become a mantra to her over the past half-decade or so. “One idea.”

The one idea this season was jeans. “We decided to do the whole show with jeans – jeans being the most universal garment,” she stated. “We wanted to do something with nothing.” It’s difficult to imagine Prada herself wearing jeans – she stated she hasn’t, ever, while wearing a grey silk slip edged in lace and a faille duster coat backstage at a preview before the show. Simons himself was wearing them, in white, a reflection of a selection of styles they were about to show. “I kept thinking sometimes the most simple and the most pure is what you need, like pasta pomodoro,” he said. “Very few ingredients, but very well executed, and nicely twisted.”

“It’s how we always work,” said Prada. Then she began to laugh. “We know what we don’t want. I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this – then what is left?” This time, it was one cut of five-pocket jeans, one cut of jeans jacket, one blazer. A few leather jackets, a T-shirt, a skinny sweater. Apparently simple, all had been refined, seemingly ceaselessly – slim cut and cropped hemlines on the jeans, narrow waistbands and cuffs their jacket – and were proposed in endless permutations, in natté wool printed with Prada-ish geometrics, in blasted motorcycle leathers, in transparent nylons and tailoring wools (“Like a new suit,” Simons said). The reduction to a pure core was striking – even bags had been hyper-minimised to small clutches, suspended from belts to avoid cluttering the silhouette. “Anti” was a word Simons favoured. Not anti-fashion, he emphasised, but anti-decoration, anti-complication.

The interesting thing about these garments though was that, really, they aren’t part of fashion. When you think of jeans, you don’t think of catwalk shows but rather imagery – James Dean, Marlon Brando, maybe the Marlboro Man? Same when we’re talking of leather jackets and T-shirts – Brando, again. They’re instantly understood, immediately relatable archetypes of dress – universal, as Prada said. “Clothes that resist time” was Simons’ statement, and really these are monoliths that have defined the dress of the past hundred years. Prada and Simons certainly weren’t trying to reinvent them, but they were, to a degree, reimagining them in different fabrications, and a new a context.

That said, the attenuated, slender man silhouette was decidedly fashion. It’s a shape each of the designers helped to pioneer in the 1990s – Simons in his own cult label, Prada on a wider stage – and one they promulgated last season, only increasing in intensity this. Both designers said it felt fresh, and new – and indeed, it has been at least 20 years since this degree of narrowness has been so aggressively proposed, necessitating drastically altered human forms within these drastically altered garment types. It was a bold and decisive choice, which pointedly runs counter to everything fashion has been proposing for at least a decade. The interesting development will be to see if this is a true volte-face, one of those rare shifts in menswear that moves aesthetics in a wider sense, fundamentally altering not only how clothes fit in any given time but a masculine perception of bodies and self. It’s early days to predict that kind of rupture – a word Miuccia Prada said defined the new – but if any brand has the influence to affect that kind of broad change, it’s Prada.