This year, Prada decided — for Miuccia’s first in-person show with her newish co-consiprator, Raf Simons — to run the exact same show in both Milan and Shanghai, each one able to watch the other projected on screens on the walls. Simons’s bite about it was, basically, that it shows “a Prada show can happen anywhere,” which… didn’t we already know that? Maybe Prada hasn’t, but plenty of other brands have explored international locations for their shows, Chanel in particular being at the fore of that. The idea of the dual livestream is neat, but ultimately not revolutionary; it’s as gimmicky as anything else. Here is some more word salad from him:

“Trains, corsets, evening gowns. These things that are historically beautiful — they are interesting, but we want to disturb them. An evening gown, however beautiful, feels like such an irreality,” Simons explained. “We want to make them feel relevant for the 21st century, for women now. We want to enjoy beauty, but in a way that is not about the past. It is about today. These clothes can become complicated: evening dresses, historical costume. We wanted to make it uncomplicated, easy. That feels modern.”

Toss that in a bowl with some ranch dressing. Along with this, from Vogue:

It’s not easy to redefine sexy, as we’ve seen elsewhere this week. Sexy is such a hackneyed concept, in fact, that fashion had more or less rejected it for the half decade leading up to the pandemic. But today in Milan and Shanghai, Miuccia and Raf nailed it.

I did not get “welcome to THE NEW SEXY” from any of this. It’s more like Hugo Boss with some Thom Browne-esque boob seams. Also, I’m sure my reaction is too simplistic, but: Look at the dress Olivia Rodrigo just wore, or any of the sheer stuff and suits with no shirts that anyone has worn in the last 5 years in fact, and tell me again that fashion has rejected sexy?!?

[Photos: Imaxtree]