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Prada Autumn/Winter 2025 Menswear
Prada Autumn/Winter 2025 menswearCourtesy of Prada

Against the Algorithm: Prada’s “Deeply Human” Menswear Show

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’s Autumn/Winter 2025 menswear show talked about a freedom to dress how you like, when you like, with neither algorithm nor designers telling you what to do

Lead ImagePrada Autumn/Winter 2025 menswearCourtesy of Prada

If Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are both often characterised as ‘intellectual’ designers, it seems they wanted to counteract that with their Autumn/Winter 2025 show. Not that it wasn’t clever – of course it was. But the show was about instinct, rather than reason, and the spontaneous and automatic rather than the laboured and overly thought-out. “Emotional and immediate, creativity without overthinking,” said Miuccia Prada. “Something deeply human.” Inexplicable was one of the words Simons used, for the thinking behind the show – a get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to having to unpack his creative processes to the press. Another was, of course, instinctive.

In those notions, the collection linked back to Prada’s S/S25 womenswear show, a purposefully wayward collection where no two looks ever seemed alike, proposed as a way to cheat the near-universal algorithms that make all of us into easily predictable dupes. Was there any meaning to the fact that this latest exercise in creative free-wheeling came on the day of a will-they won’t-they ban of TikTok in the USA, whose algorithm leads the way in terms of anticipating what we want before we even realise it ourselves? Probably not – Prada always shows on the Sunday of Milan menswear. But there was a neat synergy to that. Not that Prada wants to ban it outright, but rather, they do want us to consider other options.

So this Prada show consisted of looks that seemed assembled in a frenzy, pulled together in haste without due consideration – almost surreal, in reflection of André Breton’s recollection of the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. The encounters here were skinny satin jeans with cowboy boots with shearling-trimmed parkas or overcoats, maybe a checked shirt or a finely jacquard-striped cotton robe worn as inexplicable outerwear, or Western-wear shirt detailing transposed to knit sweaters. There was, undoubtedly, an oddness to every look – but also a beauty, which was what Breton was getting at with his surrealistic analogy in the first place.

Yet there was also a familiarity. Simons spoke of a cinematic nature, with mnemonic devices embedded in outfits – the raw-edged shearling could be back-lot Viking or The Flintstones, Spaghetti Westerns surrendered appliqué stars and those cowboy ‘smile’ pockets and boots, maybe pepped up in a 60s psychedelic floral print plucked straight from a giggly Beach Boys movie. And, like cinema, you jump-cut between those different scenes, sometimes within the same outfit, while the soundtrack swapped and changed and the lights flared up and down, in a discombobulating experience.

Ultimately, however, what this show talked about was freedom – a freedom to dress how you like, when you like, with neither algorithm nor designers telling you what to do. “Liberating creativity,” said Miuccia Prada. And the creativity was both for her and Simons as designers, and us as wearers.