Prada SS27: A rejection of design for design's sake

Fashion in 2026 is all about noise. Between disposable microtrends, manufactured celebrity culture, and Gen Z’s new archive obsession, it seems as if everything is happening at once. Prada seems to have lost patience with that. For SS27, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons has designed a collection based on the Premise that fashion has lost its way. Your solution? A return to the basics. But don’t confuse this with simple minimalism: my deepest condolences to those who still longing for the pristine days of Simons at Jil Sander.

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These are clothes that can work for anyone, although it sounds like a contradiction seeing how small some of the models were, but the point is that these are clothes that are not offensive or disruptive. They have such a languid form that gender no longer becomes a limitation.

Look 1 of the men’s collection opened with a ponytailed Julia Nobis in slim white denim and an oversized jacket, followed by her male model double in a similar ensemble. The collection is also heavily anchored in the 1980s, evident in the Atari-style teaser, color palettes, motifs, and hair. But why? It represents a shared archival memory for both designers: the decade in which Ms. Prada established her position in the industry, and for Simons, a formative era of youthful liberation and defiance seen through her eyes.

A specific maximalism was also harbored in the late 1980s, and therein lies the question. The cultural noise of that era reflects our own today, proving that the old cliché that “fashion moves in circles” remains undefeated. And what, after all, was the antidote to that noise of the 80s? It was Calvin Klein and Jil Sander who quietly perfected the less-is-more approach that would inevitably explode in the 1990s.

The solution has less to do with the technical and more to do with optimization. Nothing in the collection will go wrong. Translucent pieces may seem like a lewd allegory on the runway, but they function as blank screens on which you must display your own ideas: layer a layer of color underneath and the piece transforms and becomes new.

That contrast creates today’s statement: we don’t need to constantly demand a grand intellectual thesis from clothes. Yes, you’ve seen things from the collection before, repeated over and over again, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Nothing says good design more than the fact that it’s actually worn, even for an intellectual house like Prada. So the idea, again, is that anyone should have the ability to wear these clothes.

Given the sheer volume of trash we’re accustomed to these days, are we really surprised that this less-is-more attitude is the direction we’re headed? We certainly don’t need more and Prada believes it’s as simple as that.