This fashion month feels more important than those recent ones that have preceded it. While brands valiantly pushed through the chaos of the pandemic with collections that inspired, challenged, and delighted us, there was always a sense that designers were creating clothing that only existed in theory. With nowhere to go and no reason to dress up, the fashion of 2020 and 2021 reflected our strange times but wasn’t the uniform of them. For fall winter 2022, that’s no longer the case. ‘Real life’—the kind where we look at a runway and think of all the marvelous places we could wear the pieces—is back. How are designers going to dress us for life post-pandemic? 

The new creative partnership between Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons (the pair are now co-creative directors of Prada) was born in the earliest days of the pandemic, and their first collections have charted the course of a two-year period unlike any other in recent memory. For fall winter ‘22 the pair were laser-focused on pragmatic clothes for real life. “I don’t know if it’s because of the pandemic and everything, but the idea of reality always seems to win,” Simons explained in an interview with Business of Fashion. “We don’t really want to just make pieces that are great in the context of a fashion show.”

Prada Fall Winter 2022
Image: Courtesy of Prada

Cue: An avalanche of adorable Prada logoed tank tops, worn with office-appropriate pencil skirts with playful sheer embroidered overlays. Oversized bomber jackets with romantic floral and feather detailing. Boxy, ‘80s-style trench coats in sleek shades of black, brown, and magenta (the perfect match for the synthy ‘80s Depeche Mode soundtrack). And restrained grey tailored suits and coats, made fun with statement fur and feather cuffs in bursts of purple, pink, orange, and green.  “You want to live again, to be inspired. And to learn from the lives of people,” Miuccia Prada said in the show’s notes, which called the collection an exploration of the Prada Ideology, and noted its “fascination with and reflection of humanity”.

It’s certainly true that the collection felt like the perfect marriage between Prada’s past and its future. That was evident everywhere, down to the casting: veteran supers Erin O’Connor, Liya Kebede, Elisa Crombez, and Hannelore Knuts walked alongside new gen stars like Kaia Gerber and a newly-redhead Kendall Jenner, as well as Euphoria star and Prada face Hunter Schafer. Watching Schafer, who closed the show with an unforgettable strut down the neon-hued runway, with pared-back makeup, a simple tank, and a fabulous statement skirt, you felt the same way you feel after every one of Miuccua’s collections: it’s great to be a Prada girl.

Prada Fall Winter 2022
Image: Courtesy of Prada
Prada Fall Winter 2022
Image: Courtesy of Prada