
“Awkward” was a term Miuccia Prada coined backstage to describe the autumn/winter 2025 Prada collection – and this off-kilter, quirky, fuzzy and messy beauty really held centre stage in this immaculate celebration of awkwardness. In the now perfectly established balance of a two-handed script writing at Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons perfectly master this conceptual Prada poetry – one that mixes references and textiles like they’re textures in a painting.
The collection pivoted around open-ended questions – what is beauty in 2025? What is femininity? In an exercise of attempting to explore these spaces, the looks were structured around a meticulous deconstruction of uniforms – from rebuilt pencil skirts to woollen blouses – with huge deconstructed faux fur coats that were sculpted in a beautifully awkward way. Upscaled, reshaped, rematerialised and decontextualised – these are silhouettes whose sense and meaning have been turned on their heads. Big bold bejewelled collars create clashes with the immaculate soft textiles, as well as bows and details add girlish details, introducing additional punctuation marks in these sentences dappled with question marks.
There’s a romanticism to this decidedly chaotic poetry – one that’s reflective of the world we live in. Prada channels this energy into the glamour of these characters that populate a world haunted by pasts and hopeful for futures that feel just a bit unpredictable at the moment. Prada hones in delicately on this – and attempts, with much delicacy, to capture the zeitgeist we’re all struggling to define. And there’s an unbridled beauty in that.
See the full collection at Prada.com.
words. Patrick Clark