Prada’s AW/26 menswear show did not chase reassurance through nostalgia, nor did it reach for provocation. Instead, it asked a more pressing question: what do we build next, once we’ve learned to live with uncertainty? Designed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the collection approached menswear as a process of accumulation – of ideas, memories, and values – rather than reinvention.
Presented in the Deposito space at Fondazione Prada, the setting mattered. The architecture evoked an interior turned outward: walls sliced open, private spaces exposed. It mirrored the collection’s central tension – between what is usually concealed and what is shared publicly. In this environment, clothes became carriers of thought rather than statements of identity.
Jackets and coats were elongated, their lines sharpened but never aggressive. This was tailoring that acknowledged the body’s presence rather than overpowering it, attentive to posture, movement, and attitude. Traditional menswear elements – shirts, suits, overcoats – were recognisable but subtly altered, as if nudged out of alignment. The message wasn’t rejection of tradition, but interrogation: what happens when familiar forms are adjusted just enough to make us look again?
Construction played a central role. At first glance, many garments appeared restrained, almost simple. On closer inspection, complexity emerged – in layered textiles, careful internal architecture, and prints assembled like fragments of historical reference. These collaged surfaces gestured toward multiple eras at once: antiquity, renaissance, modernity. Rather than nostalgia, they suggested continuity – history not as something fixed, but as material to be reworked.
Colour followed the same logic. Muted neutrals, soft greys, and dusty tones created a sense of calm without slipping into anonymity. These were not clothes designed to dominate a room, but to exist within it – to last across situations, conversations, and time.
What elevated the collection was its underlying belief in clothing as a cultural object. The show notes spoke of values – care, intelligence, meaning – and AW26 treated those not as abstractions, but as design principles. The emphasis on duration was key: garments that carry traces of use, memory, and life rather than novelty. To remember, here, was framed as an act of respect – for craft, for culture, for the wearer.
