Body, body, body. Miuccia Prada wasn’t thinking about sexuality, about cleaved-close body-consciousness in dress for her Autumn/Winter 2026 Miu Miu collection. Rather, she was in a philosophical mood. “I am obsessed with the smallness of the body – in a human sense,” she said, after her show. “The contrast between ourselves, our bodies and the vastness of that which surrounds us.” Small girl, big world. Her show space at the Palais d’Ièna served to underscore the notion – a forest was brought inside, the space carpeted with real moss and bracken while its columns were plastered with rich brocade, like a wildly overgrown imperial hunting lodge. Big and bigger, power plays, foreboding territories. A lot of loaded symbolism.
A natural response would be to pump up the volume of the clothes to fill that space, as many other designers did in a season of big shoulders and bold silhouettes, but Prada did precisely the opposite. She unloaded. “A confrontation between a human and the expansiveness of the world,” was how she described it, and the room was engineered as a frame around a consistently diminutive body, for all genders. To achieve that, clothes were tugged in tight, details largely stripped away bar the sweetness of a cockeyed bow bunged on the boobs, a nod to the ribbon trims of lingerie, the clothes you wear closest to you. So, Miu Miu’s babes wandered those woods.
The silhouette, however, was still bold, the body strikingly bare, delineated in smushed-up, boiled cashmeres, scrunched and faux grease-smeared linens and stretch cotton poplin washed dozens of times to give its surface a crêpe-y pilling. That fit, given that many of the clothes referred to Miu Miu’s own past, particularly around the turn of the last century. That was there in the chunky, intentionally fugly shoes, hiking boot-sneaker hybrids crusted with crystals, or snout-toe block-heels crumbled with glitter. It was also present in the exuberantly functionless utility of cropped nylon bombers, and the poppered and snapped gaps and flaps at the hems of gangly, flared-out tubogas-narrow trousers worn underneath sweet babydoll dresses. Sometimes those dresses went out solo, emphasising the awkwardness of the bodies within – also the effect of the oversized shearling-trim trapper hats, that Prada professed she was obsessed with and served to shrink the bodies beneath to lollipop proportion. Nevertheless, the designer asserted that these clothes weren’t about vulnerability. “It’s about a strength in yourself,” she said. “The idea that I am enough – yourself is enough.”
Stripping back has its roots in the 1920s, and the work of Gabrielle Chanel, who Miuccia Prada admires, of course, and whose own family business was born in the same years. Chanel started out making hats, while Prada’s grandfather and great-uncle were devising oggetti di lusso, like toadskin purses and precious bejewelled evening bags. Clothes followed later for both – Chanel not so long, Prada some 75 years later. But their radical aims and goals are strikingly similar: freeing women, Chanel of the body, Prada of the mind. This is a complicated way of saying there was a bit of a 1920s interlude in this show, with tulle flapper dresses sparely pasted with crystal gewgaws that looked like pieces of jewellery applied to their linear forms. There were also tweed coats with protective-feeling linings of faux-Breitschwanz that recalled a Chanel trick of inverted luxury that’s right out of the Prada playbook, too. Kindred spirits.
Stripping down, paring back. In a season of bigness and muchness, of embellishment and layering – not least at her own co-authored Prada show in Milan barely two weeks ago – the atypicality of this Miu Miu collection feels typically Miuccia Prada. Its stark, even austere beauty was the perfect palette cleanser. We are enough – and this was just enough, too. These certainly felt like clothes for living, rather than clothes for showboating in. Showing up, not showing off.
