Milano Fashion Week opened this season inside Fondazione Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons handed sixty-three looks over to a single garment and titled the whole exercise The Skirt. It was a study in constraint, the kind of self-imposed rule that has always suited this house. Crystal flowers travelled across transparent pencil silhouettes and kilt hooks swelled to industrial size, while bustiers hung open over knitwear and the front row tilted forward to study hemlines. Somewhere along the way attention began sliding downward, to ankle height, where something curved and faintly absurd was carrying the whole collection along. Twenty years after its first outing, the banana heel had walked back into circulation.

The Grail Shoe, Reissued

When Miuccia Prada first gave her shoes an oblong heel that curved like fruit, the nickname stuck before the season was over. Those styles had a famously short run, which is why they surface on resale sites about as often as a lunar eclipse. For spring the shape returned in several versions, the loudest an exaggerated peep-toe pump in the house’s brushed black leather. It shared the runway with laser-cut kitten heels pinned with floral brooches and satin styles finished in pink bows, though the curve took the attention every time it passed. Prada and Raf Simons have made a habit of letting archive pieces walk beside creations seen for the first time, so the revival played as a conversation between two moments in one house.

A Fruit With Pop Credentials

The fall 2007 collection where the heel debuted was one of the odder propositions in the Prada canon, full of tufted mohair and bright stockings, with Sasha Pivovarova leading an elegantly alien cast. Prada described her impulse that season as something simple and strange, which doubles as an operating manual for her entire career. Andy Warhol understood the register when he put a banana on the cover of The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967, peelable sticker included, proof that a piece of fruit can carry enormous cool while looking faintly ridiculous. A heel shaped the same way does something comparable, lifting a woman a few inches off the ground on a silhouette with a sense of humor about itself. Until spring arrives it stays where it began, a small curve at the end of a Milan morning, holding up the season the way a comma holds up a sentence.