Prada dedicates entire spring show to skirts in Milan

Prada opened Milan Fashion Week on Tuesday with a spring 2027 womenswear collection in which every look was built around a skirt, with no dresses and no trousers. Co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons sent out 63 knee-length iterations of the garment, ranging from wool wrap skirts fastened with industrial Velcro to pleated leather, printed silk under sheer gauze, and styles embellished with crystals, paillettes and rosettes. The show notes described the skirt as engineered for freedom, autonomous yet interdependent of the clothes around it, offering a single fixed parameter for the projection of ideas. Skirts were styled with lace bra tops, cotton shirts, sweaters, rollneck knits and windbreakers, allowing looks to read as ladylike or off-kilter. The collection reflects a conviction Miuccia Prada has held for two decades. Speaking on Charlie Rose's interview show years ago, she said a skirt is like a T-shirt for a woman, a point Raf Simons said he rediscovered in an old recording. During a seated preview with editors before the show, Prada likened the skirt's rectangular shape to the frame of a painting, saying the designer is obliged to put ideas on the frame.