Prada SS27: 63 Skirts and One Beautiful Obsession

At Prada, every model came out wearing a skirt.

Sixty-three looks passed through the Fondazione Prada in Milan on September 22, and the rule never broke. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called the collection simply The Skirt.

The title carries none of the drama found in the clothes. That simplicity is part of the joke. A skirt is one of fashion’s most ordinary objects; Prada treated it with the obsessive attention usually reserved for something newly invented. The house described it as a fixed framework for endless projection, a graphic shape capable of carrying different identities while leaving the wearer free to decide what happens around it.

Then Look 1 walked out in a black lace bra and a tomato-red wrap skirt fastened with a broad black strip of Velcro. The mania had officially started.

Miuccia Prada Has Been Thinking About This Skirt for Decades

This fixation has history. In a 2006 interview with Ingrid Sischy on Charlie Rose, Miuccia Prada described the skirt as being “like a T-shirt” to her: easy, versatile and capable of carrying eccentricity while leaving the rest of the body relatively free. Around the same period, Prada’s travelling Waist Downexhibition gathered years of her skirt designs into a study of the garment as a recurring house language.

Two decades later, the idea has ripened into an entire runway.

The skirt also belongs to Miuccia personally. Her own uniform has long revolved around crewneck knits worn with full or straight skirts hovering around the shin and knee. That silhouette has become recognizable enough to generate social accounts devoted to documenting her clothes. SS27 therefore feels unusually intimate for a collection built around such a universal garment: the designers are taking one of Miuccia’s everyday habits and exploding it across 63 different personalities.

Six and a Half Years In, Raf Simons Is Deep Inside Prada

Raf Simons joined Prada as Miuccia Prada’s co-creative director in April 2020, with equal responsibility for creative decisions. Their first joint collection was Spring/Summer 2021. By SS27, they have been working together for roughly six and a half years, long enough for the conversation to feel integrated into the house instead of reading as two separate design voices sharing a runway.

The skirt itself is unmistakably Miuccia: bourgeois, feminine, practical, occasionally awkward, often decorative, and deeply connected to the history of Prada. Simons brings another kind of pressure to it. His design language has long gravitated toward uniforms, repetition, precise reduction, industrial materials, and the emotional charge created when one familiar garment is pushed through a highly controlled system.

SS27 runs on exactly that discipline.

Three months earlier, Prada menswear had concentrated on the classic five-pocket jean, taking one universal template and remaking it through different fabrics and colors. Simons said backstage that such common garments give people space to construct individuality through combinations. Womenswear continues that line of thinking with an object carrying far more personal history for Miuccia.

Prada Turns Velcro Into Jewellery

The first red skirt announces one of the collection’s smartest material games immediately.

Velcro appears in deliberately obvious strips, retaining all the visual bluntness of something usually found on sports equipment, children’s shoes or practical fastenings. Then Prada covers it with clusters of crystals. Industrial utility suddenly sparkles.

Simons described this kind of collision as “illogical behavior”: the rough functionality of Velcro sharing space with delicate crystal embroidery. The fastening also remains active, allowing skirts to open, close, alter shape, and expose different sections of decoration.

Coated cotton is engineered to resemble leather. Technical latex catches the body with a slick surface. Shiny black nylon conceals innocent florals and checks underneath, turning a familiar Prada fabric into an outer shell. Transparent chiffon traps ribbons and bows inside sheer layers. Crinoline encloses decorative elements as if the clothes have been preserved under glass. Painterly skirts carry broad swirls of color across simple forms.

A series of boxy pleated skirts comes scattered with rhinestones over contrasting Velcro. Elsewhere, florals swell into crystal decoration and paillettes turn the surface into light.

Sixty-Three Skirts, Zero Interest in Restraint

Some skirts fall straight around the legs with the almost bureaucratic neatness of an office uniform. Others open through high slits, letting the thigh slice through a controlled line. Transparent pleats create movement around the knees. Wrap constructions sit casually around the hips. Stiffer pieces hold themselves away from the body. Miniskirts suddenly interrupt the midi-heavy procession.

The opening red wrap skirt establishes the sensual temperature, and the second look changes course immediately: a turtleneck meets a chartreuse skirt split at the sides to reveal another layer underneath. From there, the collection keeps changing personality without changing category.

One of the smartest styling decisions is what happens above the waist.

Tiny lace bras, bandeaux, and miniature tops leave elaborate skirts almost absurdly exposed to attention. Oversized distressed leather jackets bring weight. Crewneck sweaters relax crystal-heavy pieces. Shirts restore a familiar wardrobe rhythm. Sweater vests lend schoolroom neatness to clothes already behaving badly.

Even the Soundtrack Wants the Skirts Off

Then Prada gets horny.

Bras shrink until they barely qualify as tops. Slits creep upward. Briefs flash beneath technical surfaces. The polished femininity associated with the skirt develops an unexpectedly dirty pulse. The soundtrack makes the suggestion explicit.

Belgian electronic group Lords of Acid’s “I Sit On Acid” comes through the room with its sexually direct refrain, turning the skirt experiment into something considerably sweatier than an academic exercise in garment construction.

The shoes lean overtly feminine. The asymmetrical glasses sharpen the face with a deliberately off-balance line. Small coin purses hang around the rib cage like odd little charms. Each accessory adds one more sideways gesture to outfits whose basic formula remains wonderfully easy to understand.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have built a runway from extreme concentration, complex textile treatments, decades of house history and a strict conceptual rule. Yet the finished wardrobe carries the spirit of someone opening a closet, taking the skirt she loves, throwing something over it, and walking out.