Prada Makes Skirts the Whole Idea: 63 Looks, One Simple Message

Prada's show this season presented 63 different skirts, and that was the entire idea. The Guardian's fashion columnist Jess Cartner-Morley reports that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons built the Milan presentation around a single garment: the skirt, styled with a sweater, a bra top or a jacket, but always with the skirt as the point.

The skirts were knee-length, give or take an inch up or down, and A-line. Some narrowed to an almost-pencil silhouette; others flared more broadly. The range was wide and deliberate.

The collection included:

• wrap skirts, constructed like kilts and held together with strips of industrial-weight Velcro embroidered with tiny gems;
• stiff, boxy pleated skirts;
• tube skirts painted with swirls;
• dainty embellished skirts with a layer of gauze on top, worn, as Cartner-Morley puts it, like a petticoat on the outside.

Why one show stood out

Cartner-Morley attends many fashion shows, and she grades them bluntly. Some are gorgeous, some ugly. Some electrifying, some deathly dull. Some completely baffling.

Her favourite kind is rarer. "My absolute favourite kind of show is the one that makes me want to run home and change my outfit," she writes. "A show that makes me think: there it is! That's exactly what I want to wear. When the look speaks to me, as if it had been on the tip of my tongue. God, I love that."

Prada did exactly that for her this season. The look spoke before she could name it. That reaction, she argues, is the test that matters more than spectacle or novelty on the runway.

What does this change for the reader?

The practical consequence is unusually direct, and it is the columnist's own advice: all you need to look on-trend this autumn is a skirt, but instead of going shopping, check what you already have in your wardrobe.

That inverts the usual machinery of a trend cycle. A trend announced on a Milan runway normally drives consumers toward new purchases. This one, as Cartner-Morley frames it, sends them toward the rail they already own. The knee-length A-line skirt is a garment most wardrobes already contain in some form.

The appeal is also in the simplicity. No layering system, no difficult proportion, no statement piece to hunt down. The idea was skirts. "That's it, that's the whole idea," she writes.

For a season, at least, the loudest message from one of fashion's most watched houses reduces to a single instruction. Wear a skirt. It is that simple — and it requires no receipt.