Less glossy, more real: Prada’s celebration of rugged masculinity
“Something savage, something primitive, something human,” said Miuccia Prada backstage at her autumn/winter men’s show in Milan, her Mona Lisa smile as enigmatic as ever as she dropped cryptic hints as to the thinking behind her new collection, designed in collaboration with Belgian designer Raf Simons. With Mrs Prada, as she’s reverentially known, the point of reference is never obvious.
On Sunday, the third day of Men’s Fashion Week 2025, the catwalk featured “masculine” tropes – both in the clothes on show and in the construction-site of a set, which was made up of different levels of scaffolding. So we got rugged, weighty shearlings, ragged and unpolished, primitively patched together, chunks of leather roughly hewn into jackets, and trousers in contrasting patchwork.
Alongside this were references to Westerns; cowboy boots with spurs, fringing, rodeo tropes on jackets. John Wayne costumery it wasn’t, however; the proportions were lean-as-you-like and the boys on the catwalk unlikely to fare well in an OK Corral gun fight.
The timing – 24 hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration – was surely no coincidence and Mrs Prada said that, naturally, world events play on her mind when she’s designing. “Yes, it’s a response to what is happening,” she said. “The feeling of resistance, passion, revolution. We have to be optimistic.”
There was very little in the way of tailoring, bar the odd boxy, severely sharp suit, and a focus on a more rustic mode of dress (albeit at distinctly un-rustic prices by the time the clothes hit the shops). There were playful, loveworn touches in the faded 60s prints and roughed-up surfaces on the leather jackets and boots. Less glossy, more real, and – said Simons – “about warmth and the domestic”. There was even a pair of pyjamas, apparently a nod to the “everyday and intimate”.
There was also, according to Simons, sensuality in all those rugged shearlings and skins. It’s not quite Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, but the idea of looking less mannered and more natural might pervade into the mainstream; no-one’s wearing a suit these days, after all.
The recent death of filmmaker David Lynch – who captured a fragmented middle America so stylishly and who has been referenced by Prada and Simons frequently – was also represented by a Twin Peaks-style crimson light that bathed the space. The profits at Prada are very much a different hue however; firmly in the black. Various luxury houses are struggling, but, last year, Prada and Hermes were the outliers whose profits leapt in a struggling market.
But back to those cowboy boots and shaggy collars. Will all this cause a shift in how men dress? It may nudge the needle a tiny bit, but Mrs Prada’s more of an arch theoriser and her show was a comment on masculinity in an age when a politician who’s made that nebulous notion part of his mercurial appeal is about to become the leader of the free world for the second time.
