Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons dissect femininity in all its contradictions—softness and structure, adornment and austerity, nostalgia and reinvention
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons aren’t in the business of giving answers. They’d rather pose the question—what does femininity mean today? Can it even be defined? Instead of a neat conclusion, Prada FW25 delivered a collection (aptly titled Raw Glamour) of a dress rehearsal of some sorts for the undefined or a mood board of shifting identities, where nothing was quite as it seemed, and everything was up for reinterpretation.
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Dresses—once the most obvious shorthand for femininity—were dissected, reshuffled, and pieced back together with raw seams and unfamiliar proportions. Was femininity in the glint of a jewel or the rawness of an unfinished hem? Or was it in the act of putting them together, of making a choice that didn’t need to be explained?
The runway itself played into this tension. Metal scaffolding loomed over a collision of the industrial and the intimate. It was a set for reinvention, where familiar tropes of womanhood were stretched, skewed, and sometimes unrecognizable. Pleated schoolgirl skirts met crinkled button-downs, a half-formed uniform for a woman still figuring out who she wants to be.
The dainty slips of past seasons grew into oversized floral dresses with the stiffness of paper dolls, a childhood fantasy aged into something sharper. Garments became rigid with reminiscence, skirts pleated like memories folded and refolded. Once a sign of innocence, ribbons stiffened into wool and leather scarves, as if bracing against the elements.
Prada has always been about contradictions—ugly/beautiful, strict/playful, past/future—but this season’s collection felt particularly pointed. It refused to crystallize femininity into one idea, instead offering fragments, shifting pieces that adapted to the body in real time. It was a rejection of rigid sculpture, a refusal to impose a fixed shape on the wearer. As Simons noted, fashion often tries to construct an ideal of feminine beauty—but here, beauty was fluid, changing with movement, open to interpretation.
And maybe that’s the point. Femininity today is not a monolith; it’s a negotiation, a game of dress-up where nothing is set in stone. The collection embraced that chaos, dressing the modern woman in clothes that could shape-shift with her. In a world where defining femininity feels impossible, Prada simply asked: Why define it at all?
Photos: PRADA
