Miuccia sent out a new breed of patrician, a class of high priestess, with clothes so revolutionary that they predicted a new era. Her collection contained genuinely new clothes, cut and fabrications yet they carried scores of cultural, historical and semiotic messages that referred to religious ceremonial gear, ecological motifs, authoritative dressing. Her fall 2008 collection was like a great novel - albeit one staged in less than 15 minutes - precisely because it was packed with so much visual information, daring and novelty that you could see it ten times and still get something new out of all the ideas.

Her choice of fabrics, the key one being Swiss guipure, was revealing. Guipure is the world’s toughest lace, which can be used as ceremonial attire, yet also as suggestive fashion. Shown without slips, but with waist tutus and breastplates, the lace dresses, jackets and skirts each suggested sensuality. On a recent visit to the regal town of St. Gallen, this critic could see for himself that Swiss lace has no competition in the world but certainly is a hard-to-maneuver fabric to base an entire collection on, like Miuccia did.

“Our financial controller is breathing down my neck as people normally order 20 or 30 meters. But I ordered 700 meters. We had them working all night in Switzerland,” an ebullient Miuccia told FWD backstage. “

The collection also swam brilliantly against the stream. At a moment when designers in Milan have more or less banished a generation of late 20s models, Miuccia mixed in a gang of “veterans” including Guinevere van Seenus and Angela Lindvall, adding to the collection’s credibility and proving again that nobody has better casting than Prada.
What was best about the collection was the manner in which it envisaged a new type of woman, self-assured yet feminine, in control but not uptight, wearing priestly wing-collar shirts, faintly threatening lace boots and dark sheaths seemingly burnished with gold or orange.

Last season, Miuccia led the whole obsession with ecological and nature prints, this season she walked in the opposite direction. There was not a floral or surreal flower or plant in sight, and yet the curvy ripple of petals and branches edged everything in this show – arty cocktail dresses, plastic pendants or leather extensions on shoes.

There was not one weak look in this show, staged on a dream-like ramp where the models circled through the audience in a Kafkaesque moment.

Backed up by a sensationally good soundtrack by Frederic Sanchez, featuring a series of tracks of a brilliant, and new to us, French band from Lyon, called Battlefield, this was an outstanding fashion moment, most likely the show of the season.

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