MFW: Prada doctors the script on black and white for Spring/Summer 2010
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The best thing about Miuccia Prada is that you know exactly what kind of genius you’re dealing with when you step off the streets of Milan into her space on Via Fogazzaro. The worst thing is having to figure out what exactly the genius is trying to say when her shows begin to unfold.
This season proved no exception, but that didn’t keep me from trying -- almost every waking moment from the time I received the show invitation until the show took place this evening. I Googled the chunks of black text on white background -- which turned out to be snippets of movie dialogue from films including ’12 Angry Men,’ ‘Sweet Smell of Success,’ ‘Strangers on a Train’ and ‘Breathless.’ (All made from 1950 to 1960, and if memory serves me correct, all black and white movies.)
At the venue, a wall closed off the long narrow runway, leaving a long narrow strip of open space at eye level, the walls, like the invitation, were covered with mixed and matched movie dialogue -- lines from ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ were pasted on the wall with lines from ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and words freed from ‘Peeping Tom’ cavorted with dialogue from ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’
When the show began, it seemed all of Prada’s slicing and dicing wasn’t creating a message -- it was the message. Jacket shoulders and trouser legs had been razored off (and telltale threads left dangling). Shirts, vests, dress shoes and even hats were perforated, aerated and spindled so completely that black garments became gray against a white background or the bare skin of a model, as did printed hound’s-tooth-patterned car coats and trippy black-and white patterned shirts.
Leave it to Prada to take one of the most noticeable trends in Milan this season -- the dearth of color and the emphasis on less-than-exciting but utilitarian black (to which Prada needs no introduction) and white -- and slice it to ribbons, poke it full of holes and rewrite the script as her own.
Exiting into the Milan evening, the staccato of the typewriter soundtrack reverberating in my ears, one more hidden meaning dawned on me: A script (or a newspaper, for that matter) is nothing more that black type against white background. What sets them apart is how they’re arranged.
And that’s the black and white truth, whether you’re print or Prada.
-- Adam Tschorn
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Photos from Prada Uomo Spring/Summer 2010 runway collection in Milan on June 22, 2009. Credit: Peter Stigter.