036: Why I Collect Prada Fall 2013

Ugly tweeds and sequins? Yes please!

“Through cloth, you can really make movies,” Miuccia Prada shared with Tim Blanks about Prada’s Fall 2013 show. And indeed movies were made from the fabric of this collection, evoking references to the films of David Lynch and Hitchcock and the heroines who transform characters on a script into legends: the elusiveness and madcap sensuality of Isabella Rossellini and Sherilyn Fenn (whose Audrey Horne re-contextualized dowdy sweaters and conservative skirts as the pinnacle of sensuality); a Mark Cross overnight bag away from conjuring Grace Kelly; Tippi Hedren unraveling. Who can forget Garbo, who discreetly commissioned Azzedine Alaïa to design her clothes? And there is certainly a touch of Alaïa in Fall 2013’s meditations on a woman’s form.

To steer away ever so slightly away from the deliberate visual references to something a bit more cerebral, there is an element of the collection’s mischief that reminds me of Madhabi Mukherjee’s face alight with repressed rage in Charulata, or when she takes in the freshly minted bank notes, her first earnings, and inhales them deeply in Mahanagar, prim and dignified in her rich and ordinary saris, respectively, and yet her youth and frustrations make her appear a little off-kilter, like she’s playing dress up, or make-believe.

Vintage fur coat; Falke tights; Miu Miu shoes; Dries Van Noten boots. Cat is part of the re-edition collection.

Eleven years since it first walked the runway, Fall 2013 remains in the top three of my favourite Prada collections (Fall 2007 is the other, and the third spot changes with where I am in life). I’ve subjected my husband to so many viewings of the video of the runway show that he can’t get himself to look at it any longer…this year. What appealed to me instantly was the dichotomy between so much smouldering energy – the set, the models and their hair and makeup, the music, the almost lackadaisical manner in which the skirts and sweaters and dress swoop, drape and hang – and the rather stuffy and stiff fabrics meant for the mustiest jackets and flat-billed caps of the pipe and tobacco variety.

I was in my early twenties when this collection came out, and for as drawn as I was to it, I was much too intimidated how resolutely grown-up its offerings were, my own sense of play and humor were missing ingredients. Though there are a few pieces one could easily feel in more comfortable territory wearing, such as sheer chiffon elegantly embellished pieces, off-shoulder wiggle dresses, or pretty pink gingham coats, closer in form to a more easily understandable beauty, it was the tweedy skirt sets and pieces in drab and strange hues I couldn’t stop thinking about that were also determinedly adult. There was something hilarious about how presidential, how very First Wife they seemed, brought to you by a woman who studied mime and political science, and attended communist rallies in Yves Saint Laurent.

Yet, despite my hesitation, over the past few years I searched for these pieces on resale sites, piecing them together from shops across the world (wide web), but then they hung tragically in my closet, the last ones I’d reach for, afraid to appear too mature, in the derogatory sense of the word. Or worse: conservative. As I was unpacking my clothes for the fall and winter a few months ago, preparing these Prada pieces for another sad season in the closet, a new, slightly different thought entered my mind. When I was so slightly younger, I was afraid these clothes would make me look older than I was, and now at thirty-four – hardly an age in the grand scheme of things, but how women are made to feel past our expiration date the minute we pass GO on thirty when we are now only edging closer to our prime! – I feared it would all only exaggerate my age. And then immediately I thought it was ridiculous.

Through her designs and the intellect that propels her work, Miuccia Prada, time and time again and certainly so with her Fall 2013 collection, confronts us with repulsions: our repulsion with ourselves, the repulsion of internalizing normative ways of dressing, examining what we find repulsive and why, and of course, the shock of being drawn to that which should be repulsive. My repulsion of my age disturbed me, and how I had adopted popular notions of how I should and shouldn’t dress, of how to look my age or cheat time, of how sex and sexuality are communicated. Prada often talks about embracing the ugly, turning ideas on their heads or inverting them. I understand a little now this exercise she invites us to be a part of.

I am now, for better or for worse, resolutely grown up. More than ten years ago I imagined this is how I wanted to dress when I was exactly where I am today. I could be more grown, but this is a fine time for now. The task of these pieces, it turns out, is being certain and accepting of who you are with levity. Not perfect, not finalized, not absolute, but taking oneself, flaws and all, with a few degrees of humor.

Humor, not taking things ever so seriously and definitely not the clothes on your back, has transformative abilities. Dress with it in mind and you may look a little out of the ordinary, which is a great way to be, and in a world where we have such finite modes of expressing ourselves, who cares what anyone thinks for as long we’re being ourselves? Dress without humor, however, and you run the risk of looking like Nancy Reagan, god forbid.