060: Why I Collect Nineties and Early-Aughts Prada
As a farewell to summer, some favorites from 1998 to 2004
One morning this week, I stepped out for an appointment when I was met with a wind gust, which in no uncertain terms, was positively brisk. I wore a mid-length skirt and a solid t-shirt, a pairing which had become my unofficial uniform for this summer, and wished I had brought a light jacket or a cardigan with me. A cautioning of the season's impending end.
Some of the more enduring memories from my childhood and adolescence originate in the summertime. For a period, the summer holiday meant a respite from school – where I remained hopelessly uncomfortable until my last day – and the opportunity to travel, to see my cousins, to see places familiar and those entirely new. On visits to London to see my aunt and two cousins I had grown up with, my mother packed our suitcases with mangoes, custard apples, jackfruit, and dried fish. In exchange, we returned back to Dhaka with Dairy Milk, Digestive biscuits, and pungent and delicious bags of Monster Munch.
There was the summer my parents and I visited Toronto for the first time, and on that same trip, to what we referred to as America for the first time since I was a baby. I was eight years old at the time, and there are photographs of myself on the glass floor of the CN Tower and in front of the White House. When my father had begun the process of migrating our family to America, my summers were composed of phone calls to a boy which lasted early into the morning (and trying not to get caught by my mother), playing The Sims and inhaling the first two seasons of The O.C. with my cousin while our mothers were at work, and exploring the world with the aid of our newly installed broadband.
This summer has felt somehow abbreviated. As I was just done hanging up the last of my summer clothing, the call came for layers. If you live in New York, with seasonal change comes the exhausting task of rotating out linens for knits, every last bit of storage bursting at the seams. Before I pack away my pieces, I wanted to share some of my favorites from summers present and past.
It was during one of my last summers as a teenager that the works of Miuccia Prada had really resonated with me in some lasting way. By way of a magazine at a tailor's workshop, I had come across Prada's Spring/Summer 2004 campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel, the models depicted in a watercolor late-summer haze. The collection and campaign were already a few years old by that point, but I didn't care, and twenty-one years later, I am yet to tire of it. I suppose one could say that this points to the way Prada, both the designer and the brand, has the rare ability to transcend time, setting trends while bypassing them entirely. What is old becomes new again, a valuable lesson with regard to how we view our clothes.
The spring and summer collection from 2004 remains my longest fashion relationship. So enamored I was by it, that as a teenager I had a dress made to replicate the feeling of a tie-dye dress worn by Daria Werbowy in the campaign. It fascinates me to think that the outline of my tastes as they are today had begun to loosely form over two decades ago. There were minor interruptions along the way, an unfortunate dalliance with skinny jeans, but somewhere the idea had taken root that as a fully-formed flesh and blood adult, that was how I wanted to dress: big-in-spirit skirts and mid-length dresses, interchangeably ugly and beautiful.
Traveling in time back to 1998, Miuccia Prada produced one of her most cerebrally sexy (to me) collections. Absent from it were nostalgia and longing, the latter of which not be confused with desire. The collection seems to have been born in that very moment, perhaps even ahead of its time, and nearly thirty years later manages to still remain modern, even more than what many brands have to offer today. On their own, the drab beige hemp tops would look simply ordinary, but the addition of sheer latex panels transforms them from dull to perverse.
Prada’s Spring/Summer 2003 show was regarded with divisive reception. The appearance of little knit shorts and mini skirts ruffled the feathers of a fair number of editors, one alleging that it would make women feel as though they were being “shunted off to the junior department.” It’s an interesting take, as the collection seems to have a foundation set in the 1960s of Cardin, Rabanne, and Courrèges, as well as the women’s liberation movement. What I appreciate most about this collection is how a range of diverging ideas, from couture fabrics to the essence of sportswear to chunky childlike plastic appliqués merged to create a collection that is unmistakably Prada: the beautiful and the ugly, conflict and contradiction.
One of my earliest secondhand purchases was a brown and white skirt from Spring/Summer 2001. Of this collection, Miuccia Prada told journalist Cathy Horyn, “The moment you start being in love with what you’re doing and think it’s beautiful or rich, then you’re in danger.” It was Prada’s confrontation of her discomfort with the 80s. It was a departure from the 1940s romanticism of the previous fall season, almost entirely devoid of prints with the exception of a few stripes and repetitive floral patterns in yellow and brown, and one that the designer and her present co-conspirator Raf Simons have referenced frequently in recent collections.
Over the past year or two, hot on the heels of Y2K (the Bush years, the ceaseless wars) came the vintage Prada trend. Overnight, it seemed people were shelling out small fortunes on Prada from the mid-nineties to mid-aughts to make thirty second-long videos ending on a leg pop. Did sentimentality guide these purchases, or a connection to the ideas or styles they communicated? For some, certainly, but my cynic suspects a good number of people were buying to belong, the whiff of virality, or supplanting an identity with stuff. Here, longevity has no place.
The pieces I collect, though I hesitate to use the term “collect”, comes from a place of sentimentality, and yes, at times, desire. It begins with an image in a magazine from a very long time ago, and how I made that image my own. As an adult, the clothes we buy and wear should not be dictated by an algorithm, but because of how they make us feel, and how we feel in them. I wear these clothes relentlessly because they bring me pleasure, and because I dress to please myself.
I love every piece of your collection and how you put everything together. I would wear it all…
such a beautiful collection, i always enjoy your photos so much