Media theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase The Medium Is the Massage, or Message, depending on whether you have the book with the misprint in the title or not. What became instantly apparent at Prada’s women’s wear S/S 2027 collection was the skirt being the medium used for all kinds of messaging. There were no pants in sight — a surprising move after showing men’s in June, where pants were at the centre, non-denim denim pants to be exact, in the skinniest of executions. And it’s no surprise that Miuccia Prada normally heavily lends her women’s wear ideas from the men’s collection shown a couple of months prior. This season however, more of the concept carried over than the actual pieces themselves. Exactly this honing-in process, this over-focusing on one thing, has become the co-design modus operandi of Prada and Simons. And what better way to hush critical voices along the lines of “too much Simons, not enough Prada” than by putting the skirt at the centre of an entire collection? The piece of clothing one is most likely to associate with Prada herself.

Let’s stay in chronological order here: The opening looks had skirts fastened via Velcro, allowing the wearer to adjust fit and hip placement depending on how tightly you closed it. Great. Then came skirts with the same idea, embellished with crystals on top of Velcro, creating some tension between the very feminine adornments and something as heavily utilitarian as Velcro. Also great. The plethora of wrinkled, pleated or printed skirts was to be expected but did not fall flat, thanks to some wild print clashes with bralette tops or unexpected material combinations, like hefty, yet romantic hardware flowers on a barely-there organza base layer. The concept of the wearer actually carrying and holding together the skirt in lieu of any fastening was a very Prada-esque idea. We can’t imagine it being commercially viable, though. What we saw on the models’ top halves however, we can only imagine flying off the shelves – a best-off Prada basics: Subdued sexy via lacey bralettes, sturdy oversized leather jackets (Hi, Raf!), lush knits and genderless shirting.

Something we missed in this collection was a boundary being pushed. There were skirts, but not really any new ideas for the garment per se. We saw countless iterations, and yes, it goes without saying they were all great to look at and probably even greater to wear — but a fresh idea like the skirts from Prada S/S 2026 could have done well in this line-up: the ones that back then we called elongated tank tops, with such long shoulder straps that they eventually became a skirt held up via the shoulders. But then again, maybe it wasn’t about re-invention at all, and more about a re-evaluation of this Prada-centric piece of clothing.