Every design house eventually gets reduced to one signature piece: Burberry's trench, Dior's Bar jacket. For Prada, that's always been the skirt. Miuccia Prada has leaned on an A-line cut almost exclusively since taking over her family's company in the late 1970s, and this week, she and co-creative director Raf Simons made that devotion literal with a spring 2027 Milan show built entirely around skirts, titled, simply, "The Skirt."
Across 63 looks, there wasn't a single dress, pair of trousers, or pair of shorts in sight. The show notes described it as an exercise in exploring one idea within strict limits, and the skirts themselves ranged wildly in treatment: pleated in muted grays and blacks with sudden flashes of fluorescent panel, layered and gathered with bows, printed with loose graphic sketches, dip-dyed into something closer to a Rothko canvas, or covered edge to edge in crystal embroidery. A recurring, slightly subversive touch had delicate jewels fastened on with industrial Velcro, the kind of contradiction Prada collections tend to build in on purpose.
Simons has talked about that contradiction as central to the house's identity, pointing to the skirts' staying power, their eccentricity, shape, and decoration, as proof there's something in the design language that doesn't go out of date. On the runway, that meant pairing the skirts with chunky leather jackets, tailored shirts, silky bra tops, and glittering heels, treating the one fixed element as a blank canvas for everything layered on top of it.
