Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2015: Fendi and Prada’s Rapid Runway Reinvention

Feb 27, 2015
2 min read

What is pretty? What is elegant? What is beauty?

And most importantly, what do customers want?

These are the questions that editors and designers have been wrestling with at the start of Milan Fashion Week. Not a show went by on Thursday where a colleague or a seatmate didn’t stop to ask, sotto voce, “So what did you think of Gucci?” Alessandro Michele’s debut collection from the day before was ultimately one that stumped the audience, not sure really whether or not to like his intellectual approach, with vintage clothes that served mostly to de-sex the classic Gucci mold.

Tomorrow, they will be asking, “So what did you think of Prada?” and “So what did you think of Fendi?”

As fashion in the digital age moves away from the traditional system of minting trends that slowly trickle down to the masses, more and more we are seeing designers turn their aesthetics on a dime. So it was that Miuccia Prada, after spring’s foray into antique brocades, moved on to a fall collection full of sweetness and an almost plastic sense of perfection, with models that looked as if they came straight from a beauty pageant frozen in time. And at Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld and Silvia Venturini Fendi, showed something that was nearly devoid of the hyper-embellishments and furry cartoon critters of recent seasons.

Both collections played with proportions with very different results. At Fendi (pictured, above), the coats were dramatically oversize, shown in variations of real furs and technical fabrics that replicated fur as a teddy-bear cuddly fuzz. The first look was a cream-colored coat that widened at the hips, and later came a pale puffer duvet coat as big as the Liberty Bell. In between, the designers played with a deconstructed sort of patchwork, affixing large rectangular panels of fabric or fur to the sides of coats, dresses, and leather skirts, resulting in what resembled a softer form of armor. For a touch of color, birds-of-paradise were placed inside many of the patchwork fur bags.