At dinner with the Prada public relations team—somewhere between vacation chatter, work talk, and the cacio e pepe and tiramisu course—the real question surfaced: Why do we this? Why travel 3,500 miles multiple times a year to see a fashion show? Why stay up until 3 a.m. to write about a collection? I was talking about making this magazine, which you’ll see soon in the flesh—our print issue comes out next week—when I said, “We don’t want to be a B2B magazine. Real people have to care.”
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons clearly feel the same way. Their Fall 2025 Prada runway show charted a new course in the otherwise meh season, offering compelling clothes that question the status quo.
Look around other shows in New York and Milan, and you see a lot of the same stunts: A 1990s supermodel here, a seasonally relevant TV actor there, a beautiful social media star in the front row, and clothes that seem to cater to the lowest common denominator. The dress is a great dress, the coat is a great coat, the bag has a bit of charm, the shoes are lovely little leather pumps to pad your soles in propriety. In the wearable, relatable, slightly chicer-than-you-are-right-now clothes of the Fall 2025 season, there is a pleasant sameness. It’s like the art in corporate office lobbies: I know it costs a lot of money and is inherently prestigious, but it doesn’t make me think about anything in particular.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are the thinker’s designers. As they worked to explain the thesis of their Fall 2025 collection—titled “Raw Glamour” in the press release—the pair circled from ideas of modern femininity (which they are deconstructing) to the times we live in (which they are lamenting). Their statements on what is beautiful today offer no easy conclusions. Some highlights from the backstage scrum:
“Those four black dresses are very much today. We are in a real black moment,” said Prada of the show’s opening looks.
“It’s complicated when everything becomes a flashback instead of an eye on the future,” said Simons. “When we think about liberating, we very much think about the clothes, the clothes, the clothes—but it’s also about our own way of thinking. Liberation always comes with risk-taking… You cannot liberate if you don’t take risk.”
“For me, glamour is not a sexy dress—it’s the opposite. It’s an interior point of view, a feeling of importance,” said Prada.
“There needs to be more resistance in the world—and I’m not just talking about the collection,” said Simons.
“Strangely enough, I can’t quite read this show,” Mrs. Prada conceded after the Washington Post’s Rachel Tashjian suggested the show was beautifully awkward. “You say awkward—I hope it was awkward.”
The dowdy housedresses—resembling supersized, sack-like versions of traditional 1950s housewife garb—certainly had a rugged strangeness to them. The front-pleated skirts sat so low and looked so freaky, erasing the models’ slender legs yet giving them a wild sex appeal. A prim 1960s red dress with a flat bow at its drop waist was tugged into a slouchy shape and styled over a men’s button-down and jeans. You heard me: the blue-blooded Jackie O uniform got supersized, slouchy, and layered over the 1990s Sharon-Stone-in-The-Gap everywoman uniform?! Oh, I’ll be thinking about this for days!
At one point, a model turned the corner on the swaying scaffolding in an acid chartreuse opera caftan with a shearling collar. My jaw dropped. I turned to my friend and saw her jaw on the floor too. After the show, Hunter Schafer said it was her favorite look. It was like an Edward Kirchner painting come to life—a woman lurching down the streets of Berlin at a treacherous time.
Right now is our own treacherous time. “Every single morning, you read the newspaper and want to suicide,” Prada said bluntly. “Keeping up hope is a big effort. We think—and I think—that the only thing you can do … [is] work hard, work very seriously on what you have to do.”
Prada and Simons are setting a precedent: billion-dollar brands with global audiences and market demands don’t have to be merely pleasant, middling, or safe. Their clothes are so complex and laden with meaning that they become downright divisive—and that’s delightful. This is why I do all of this: to be challenged. I hope that by immersing myself in the viewpoints of diverse designers, artists, and writers over 30 days in four countries, I will, in fact, become smarter and develop a sharper perspective on what it means to get dressed in 2025.
I’m not alone. Fashion fans crave a challenge. Online, Prada is the big show that gets commentators going, hotly debating what the brand is saying about contemporary life. “Absolutely awful” and “absolutely stunning” are the two most popular comments under i-D’s Instagram post from the show. Being about now means being complicated. That’s what makes Prada worth the trip.
