Miu Miu, Chanel & Saint Laurent

Miuccia Prada gave last-minute excitement to the fall shows by turning the cheap-looking and ugly into fashion. It happened at Miu Miu, where such provocations often occur, and the relative ordinariness of her clothes also made for good social commentary.

First, let’s consider the grooming, because Prada’s hair and makeup always tell a great deal. If the models were not wearing a version of a 1920s felt cloche or had crewcuts, their hair was lightly teased or pinned into a bouffant. The helmet heads could be read as Babe Paley — recently depicted in Feud: Capote vs. The Swans — or a secretary trying to keep up with fashion. Either way, the feeling was the early ’60s, before the advent of the youthquake. The makeup was equally ambiguous: The light-pink lipstick and added lashes or liner at the ends of eyes could be read as both tasteful and tacky. In her brief press note, Prada said, without elaborating, “There is a sense of tension and anxiety today, and of fear.” One source of tension, and a topic seldom addressed by designers, is surely class.

Second, the sound at Miu Miu transmitted those same feelings. In recent seasons, Prada has featured video-art installations, often without a clear link to the clothes. But this time she opened with the bebop-y “Carly & Carole,” composed by Shigeo Sekito in 1975, a sound you can imagine hearing in a cocktail lounge when everyone smoked. The first dozen or so looks boiled down to two ideas: a feminine suit in a heavy and (plainly) unrefined wool, with a jacket that gaped at the neck and shoulders, and a long-sleeved top and knee-length skirt, both often in a ribbed and lightweight fabric, and worn with thin ribbed knee socks or skintight, block-heeled boots. Many models carried a faux-fur stole and a handbag in the crook of an arm, as ladies did; and their undergarments also made a point — literally. Evident under the simple tops and gaping jackets were satin bras with points.

From left: Photo: Courtesy of Miu MiuPhoto: Courtesy of Miu Miu

From top: Photo: Courtesy of Miu MiuPhoto: Courtesy of Miu Miu

Although the features of a few models suggested socialites, I never got the sense of “ladies who lunch” or that Prada was even interested in mocking the type. Quite the contrary, the world I saw was London in the late ’50s and early ’60s, a still-postwar England of gloom and shortages and girls in bad clothes that one can see in photographs and New Wave British cinema, movies like A Taste of Honey. An English friend of mine, coming out of Miu Miu, mentioned a young Maggie Smith, cueing Prada’s drab wool suits and coats, though Smith’s characters never wore them so awkwardly.

Before things got posh, before luxury corrupted fashion, people had different expectations about how they should dress. Or, rather, they hardly expected anything. A sweater and a skirt sufficed. Depending on your age and social class, you looked either chic in such a style or hot and maybe a little cheap if you couldn’t afford the good stuff (or didn’t know better). One outfit in the show that epitomized that sense was on a blonde model, with a lantern jaw and glasses. It consisted of a dark pink jersey top, a plaid skirt in candy shades of orange, red, and green, and a frumpy light-green cardigan (or fleece) dressed up with a gold broach.

On the face of it, the outfit is pretty awful. Then again, is it any worse than a lot of the jumped-up “luxury” styles we see on runways? On Tuesday, Chanel had the ridiculous idea of veiling its classic bouclé suits entirely in tulle. Why? And the house went berserk for bows. (The Chanel collection was again designed by the studio team. Matthieu Blazy, the new artistic director, gets to work in a few weeks.)

From left: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel

From top: Photo: Courtesy of ChanelPhoto: Courtesy of Chanel

Prada also said, “We really wanted to create an elegance with nothing — through the everyday, through direct manipulations of simple pieces.” An elegance with nothing. One could argue that a lot of those everyday pieces are based on vintage styles — the satin evening slips, for example, that Prada has long favored, or the boxy suits. At Valentino, Alessandro Michele’s clothes also struck me as vintage. Yet the difference with Prada and her team, which at Miu Miu includes the stylist Lotta Volkova, is that they don’t use it literally. They make something new out of it. And, for me, Prada also seemed to be sensitive to the anti-elitist mood in the world at the moment, and found a way to express or at least acknowledge it in her fashion.

One further thought on Miu Miu, as well as the Prada show in Milan. Miuccia Prada joins a number of designers this season who pivoted toward more realistic-looking clothes and fit, among them Demna of Balenciaga and Sarah Burton of Givenchy.

Anthony Vaccarello of Saint Laurent is the master of the one-note collection, and I say that full of respect. Last season, Saint Laurent was all about the masculine suit, shown on repeat. On Tuesday night, the close of the fall ready-to-wear season, in a gigantic, multimillion-dollar box-style tent, against sleek walls that resembled the richest marble — or the décor of a five-star hotel — it was all about a simple, high-necked tunic dress or a similarly cut blouse and a normie knee-length skirt. No pants or tailored jackets, though Vaccarello did show some short wool coats and leather blousons.

Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

Vaccarello is like a hammer to a nail. He puts down a style, then gives you the whole Saint Laurent rainbow — the gorgeous greens, blues, reds, pinks, and leopard spots. And he wasn’t wrong. A skirt and a top — what else do you need?

Courtesy of Saint Laurent.

Courtesy of Saint Laurent.