At the mark of a quarter-century, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons negotiated what beauty and femininity mean at Prada. If we were to take a sweeping survey of the Western beauty ideal and the concept of the feminine, it would include a surgical menu of procedures and modifications. When, post-show and backstage, the two designers discussed what constitutes beauty, a photographer suggested that it is “er, probably Double D’s.” For now, it seems that fashion holds less significance in creating a look than in the size, shape and characteristics of the bodies that wear them.

Mrs. Prada and Simons’ principal drive is concept; an act of managing bodies: "the margins and boundaries of which," as Joanne Entwhitsle writes, "are rich in symbolic meaning and cultural and individual anxieties." Like the intentions of their Fall/Winter men’s collection—shown earlier in February and titled ‘Unbroken Instincts’—which developed the idea of this pre-textual, instinctual approach, for their women’s collection they continued what British psychologist John Flügel described as “a primitive conflict between modesty and display.”

The first four looks of the collection comprised housedresses and sheaths rendered in herringbone wool in dark greyed tones. Elsewhere the thick wool dress in Crayola red, worn over a white shirt and blue jeans, and florals in lime on a base of process yellow were executed in hard, crisp, or “untypical fabrics” (a Prada press term) that repelled touch and seemed to deny any seduction. The executive decisions made by Mrs. Prada and Simons avoided anything form-fitting, drawn-in or contoured, something that was described by Prada as “upscaling.”

The style to many of the looks brought to mind the work of the American designers of the mid-century populuxe boom, namely James Galanos, Mollie Parnis and Oleg Cassini. Cassini was famous for crafting clothing that was seductive only by its pragmatism and simplicity. His clothes were a vehicle for the persona of the First Lady Jackie Kennedy. In Kennedy’s demand for “practical expediency,” she implied in a letter to Cassini, “You know the kind I like, a covered up look”, referring to shift dresses, a plain cloth coat in a ‘fashionable A line’, solid colours and buttons and bows as accents, just like the ones presented at Prada. Though, here, the dresses are covered with large lozenge-like buttons and bows that are used to adorn what would be the waist or bust.

Later in the show, there were subtle inclusions of shaping with exposed seams and darts that wrangled oversized leather skirts and formed paper-bag waists. One such look had a crushed white shirt tucked in. This was executed in a rudimentary way, with the garments appearing to hang or float, as opposed to tracing the hips or waist, thus removing any sexuality. There were appliqué fur collars on topcoats and Crombies, and then larger lumpy collars that harked the primitivism of the men’s show, but without the raw edges. Framing the face instead of the neck or décolletage, the collars altered the usual focus to that of the model or the end wearer.

The models had a clean, yet slightly WASPy appearance. Their hair was brushed and worn loose or teased into a loose chignon. For accessories, there were spike-heeled pumps and shoulder and baguette-style bags, some with an aged effect on their edges. These bags were tightly snapped, zipped up... and buckled, suggesting, as writer Alison Lurie explained, a woman who, “guards her emotional and physical self closely.”

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2004 Mrs. Prada stated how she sometimes thinks that “the obsession with fashion is just about the desperation of being sexy.” This statement has become a preoccupation for the designer, and the house of Prada at large, even twenty-one years later.

In fashion we are caught between choices that are free and display the body’s borders and those that concern a rational way of dressing. Mrs. Prada and Simons have freed the 2025 woman of the myth of liberty that beauty has promised—the beauty myth. At Prada we have clothing that says, “no thanks,” and we are thankful for that!