Miuccia Prada’s unwitting assist to Tajani

Certainly, by showcasing around sixty knee-length skirts for next spring, ‘the lady’ – who in Milan means Miuccia Prada – had not given a thought to the controversy in which Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani has been embroiled for a good forty-eight centimetres regarding the length of skirts that make, or would make, a woman marriageable and a good mother – undoubtedly the least successful hyperbole of his career. ‘The lady’ was certainly thinking of the Prada item that has always sold best – in Italy but above all abroad – alongside the handbags: namely, the skirts she designs first and foremost for herself and which have been collector’s items for decades. However, in these days of memes and mockery, even the unwitting endorsement from a lady of Milan’s high society – a militant feminist since the 1960s – is not to be sniffed at; and so Miuccia Prada, who at the start of the fashion show framed the skirt as a “flexible, adaptable contemporary object that invites contradiction”, was the best the minister could have hoped for.

Not least because it was an imaginative and entertaining show, at times bordering on pure eccentricity – after all, not everyone can gracefully combine Velcro and crystals, nor make a crinoline look interesting and contemporary, wrap certain flared sheath dresses in sheer synthetic fabric like delicate chrysalises, or fold a masculine fabric at an angle to transform it into a skirt with real character, or even leave metres of fabric loose, forget about hems, so that it can be grasped and carried over the arm like a train. Pure invention, yet all just above or at knee length, as the women of Milan have always worn them, regarding the miniskirt as something for schoolgirls (indeed, Miu Miu sells them) and, objectively speaking, without ever giving a second thought to respectability. Quite simply, the knee-length skirt is more beautiful, drapes better, and serves the aim of this collection – and of the Prada philosophy in general – with greater ease: to make skirts the new T-shirts, ‘blank canvases on which to sketch new ideas’. Think freely, beyond the centimetres.