The skirt as object. For the Prada Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons focus on an interrogation of this single, universal garment, through protean variation.

Engineered for freedom, the skirt is a Prada obsession. At once autonomous and interdependent of the clothes around, its definitive graphic silhouette, linear and modernist, offers the single fixed parameter for projection of ideas. The collection stays within the particular form language of this specific skirt, as an exercise of exploration inside strict parameters, a frame for ceaseless creation.

Purpose and use form an aesthetic language distinct to Prada. Velcro in contrasting colorations may be used as the base for crystal embroideries, without denial of an inherent functionality. As a fastening, it allows skirts to adapt, to modify, altering shape and visual affect through the revealing or concealing of embellishment. Magnified metal snap fasteners are jeweled while crinoline, an internal component, becomes decorative layer, or protective shell.

Materialities directly transform perception, challenging and subverting established form language. Industrial fabrications – ciré matt, Re-Nylon – are illogically translated to plissé, cotton is treated to resemble leather or suede. Jewelry skirts recreate a guipure lace in crystal, modest and innocent floral prints appear in cotton and synthetics. A pleated skirt expands beyond the body, its untethered material held in the hand, shifting gesture. Layers evoke a dynamic of revelation.

Equally, our perception of a garment may be changed through its friction with other. A skirt may be abstracted, a fragment of a whole with a mutating rapport with the pieces it juxtaposes: a sweater, a shirt, a bra top, can each suggest alternate readings of a whole.

Here, there is inherent beauty found in the survey of the familiar – in asking how many forms a known thing might assume, how many different possibilities may exist within.