By now, we’ve all seen the images. Sixty-three looks, not a single pair of trousers in sight, a runway that felt like a thesis defence. Prada’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, The Skirt, turned Milan into one long, glorious argument for the skirt – pleated, crystal-strewn, slashed at the thigh, built from everything from distressed leather to candy-coloured nylon. The internet did what it does: gasped, screenshotted, and declared the skirt ‘back’. Except, for Miuccia Prada, it never left.
Prada S/S 2027
Because if there’s one thing Miuccia has never grown tired of, it’s the skirt. Long before this week’s all-skirt spectacle at Prada, she was already treating the humble hemline the way most designers treat their entire brand identity – as the one place she could put everything she was thinking. In the show notes for this collection, she and co-creative director Raf Simons put it almost matter-of-factly: “Engineered for freedom, the skirt is a Prada obsession.” An obsession is exactly what it’s been.
A Love Letter
The genius of this season is that it doesn’t pretend to be new. Miuccia once said that the skirt has always functioned for her the way a T-shirt functions for a man – blank, versatile, “the place where she can put all her ideas.” Which explains a lot, actually, about why this season felt less like a single collection and more like a career-spanning retrospective.
It also arrived at an unusually charged cultural moment. Just four days before the show, Italy’s deputy prime minister Antonio Tajani suggested that a ‘flashy’, attractive woman was more likely to be unfaithful, while a ‘less flashy’ woman in a longer skirt made for a more reliable wife and better mother. The remarks drew immediate backlash, with opposition politicians and unions criticising the comments, while politician Chiara Appendino responded with a photograph of herself in a miniskirt, asking whether that made her any less ‘trustworthy’. Tajani later apologised “if people felt offended”, saying his comments had been misunderstood.
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Prada’s show, planned and produced long before any of this, ended up landing squarely in the middle of it anyway. On the runway, skirts had nothing to prove about modesty, morality or femininity; they moved with the wearer, on her terms. A garment so often loaded with ideas about how women should behave became something far more potent: a vehicle for movement, choice and self-definition. The hemline was no longer a measure of character.
Why The Skirt, Specifically
t’s worth being precise about why this argument lands the way it does, because the skirt’s relationship to constraint isn’t abstract – it’s legal history. In Paris, an 1800 police ordinance required women to obtain authorisation before ‘dressing as a man’, effectively restricting their ability to wear trousers in public. The ordinance emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, when trousers had become a political symbol of the working-class ‘sans-culottes’. Women were, quite literally, kept out of the era’s revolutionary uniform. The ordinance was amended over the following century to allow exceptions related to cycling and horse riding, but remained on the books long after it had ceased to be enforced. In 2013, France’s Ministry for Women’s Rights clarified that it had already been implicitly repealed and had no legal effect. For over two hundred years, in other words, the skirt wasn’t simply the more common choice for women. In the world’s fashion capital, women’s right to wear trousers had once been explicitly restricted by law.
Portrait of George Sand: Getty Images
That history is part of what makes Miuccia’s reframing so interesting. When Prada calls the skirt “engineered for freedom,” it turns a garment historically associated with prescribed femininity into an argument for choice. The same garment once used to define how women were expected to dress becomes a canvas for everything Miuccia refuses to have defined for her.
We’ve Seen This Show Before, Literally
Here’s the thing that makes this season land differently if you know your Prada history: she’s already staged a version of this retrospective, more than twenty years ago. Back in 2004, Miuccia teamed up with Rem Koolhaas’s think tank AMO for an exhibition called Waist Down, which did exactly what it sounds like – it gathered a hundred skirts from her archive, going all the way back to Prada’s first-ever womenswear collection in 1988, and sent them on a world tour. Tokyo, then Shanghai’s Peace Hotel, then New York’s SoHo Epicenter, then LA, then Seoul. A hundred skirts, museum-lit, treated with reverence.
Photograph: OMA
The exhibition’s own framing said it best: it paid homage to the skirt as “the often overlooked and underappreciated stepsister” of the dress and the coat. That’s the whole Miuccia move, really: take the thing everyone assumes is boring, and prove, with sheer force of repetition, that it’s actually where all the interesting ideas were hiding the whole time. This September’s show wasn’t simply a nostalgic echo of Waist Down. It extended the same argument, twenty years and several hundred more skirts later.
Before The Archive, There Was Ugly Chic
Push further back, to Spring/Summer 1996, and you hit the collection that made Miuccia’s whole worldview click into place: the one fashion history now shorthands as ‘Ugly Chic’. Officially titled Banal Eccentricity, the collection took clashing 1950s oilcloth prints, faux tweed and deliberately sickly colour combinations – including that bilious yellow-green that’s still nicknamed ‘Miuccia Sludge’ – and put them, unapologetically, on skirts. Editors at the time were reportedly horrified. Miuccia later called the resulting ‘Ugly Chic’ label “a terrible phrase,” but conceded that’s simply how it came out.
Prada S/S 1996
It’s worth remembering how genuinely radical this was in 1996: a designer using the skirt, a garment so often associated with conventional femininity, as her vehicle for deliberately provoking bad taste.
And Before That, A Uniform
Go back even earlier, into Prada’s first proper womenswear years at the tail end of the eighties, and you’ll barely recognise the skirt at all. It wasn’t playful yet. It was armour, sharp tailoring, epaulettes, stiff collars, metal belt buckles.
Photograph: Firstview (Prada S/S 1999)
That’s the part people miss when they call this season’s all-skirt show a “moment.” It isn’t one moment. It’s the fourth or fifth act of a long-running story – severe in the early nineties, deliberately ugly by ’96, exhaustively archived by the mid-2000s, and now, finally, given an entire season all to itself.
Every Runway, A New Draft
Cecilia Chancellor – Prada S/S 1996
What’s remarkable, flipping back through three decades of Prada shows, is how little the skirt repeats itself. There’s the bias-cut, forties-inflected silk skirt from that same Spring/Summer 1996 show, worn by Cecilia Chancellor. There’s the Fall/Winter 2002 collection, where skirts got the hardware treatment, metal chain fringe standing in for fabric. There’s Resort 2019, industrial techno jersey wrapped and ruffled into something almost tender. And there’s when illustrator James Jean’s fairytale prints turned up on rubber-tabbed wrap skirts, storybook meets sportswear.
Which Brings Us Back To Right Now
Prada S/S 2027
So when this week’s runway sent out skirt after skirt – sensible grey tailoring next to crystal-flower eveningwear, satin slit and fastened with industrial Velcro, sheer crinoline layered over crumpled silk – it wasn’t a designer discovering a new idea. It was a designer returning, one more time, to an idea that has preoccupied her for decades. Miuccia has said, plainly, that nothing surpasses the skirt for practicality and creativity.
The skirt isn’t back because, for Miuccia Prada, it was never gone.
