The Prada guide to dressing for doomsday

Or do you simply pull on a pair of elbow-length satin gloves, slip on some bejeweled pumps and sparkling drop earrings, and head out?

Say you are sitting at home in your underwear when a natural disaster looms. Do you pause to change into something more appropriate, or just add a pea-green chore jacket, grab a handbag and go?

Say you are faced with a confluence of unexpected events and don’t have time to figure out an outfit amid the chaos. Don’t fret. Adapt.

Such was the life lesson of the Prada show Thursday, told through clothes. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, co-creative directors of the brand, have never exactly been pegged as doomsday preppers, but that was the vibe. Backstage, watching them practically disappear amid a tsunami of well-wishers, you could understand why. They did set the show atop a floor the shade of an orange hazmat suit.

A model wears a Prada design from the spring 2026 collection during a show in Milan, Sept. 25, 2025. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are co-creative directors of the brand. (Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times)

The result was an argument for the need to make do and not mend but mix and unmatch, using the clothes on your back or at hand (or in the Prada archive). Because you never know what bad, or maybe good, but these days probably bad, thing is going to happen next.

It’s an alluring idea in theory. There’s liberation in the imperative to toss out old assumptions about what should be worn with what, where and how, and ignore genre conventions as exigencies require.

In execution, though, it was somewhat less persuasive.

For every great combination of opposites — like the daffodil-yellow party frock under a military parka with opera gloves and clutch bag, or the celadon 1960s cocktail dress with a pink bejeweled neckline tossed like a sweatshirt over a tangerine taffeta pouf of a skirt — there were some hypotheticals that didn’t quite come off.

Like the scraps of fabric that looked like bras with the structure taken out, or maybe just the idea of a bra or the anamnesis of a bra, rather than any sort of actual support garment.

“A useless bra,” Miuccia Prada called it backstage. In Prada-land, uselessness can be a thought experiment, and in a Darwinian world, it’s a luxury. But whether anyone will want to spend Prada money on a useless garment — or should — is debatable (though possible, given Prada’s track record in her other gig at Miu Miu when it comes to influencers and impractical clothing). And so it went.

For every terrific hybrid, like the wrap skirt pieced together from three or four or even five different swaths of lace and pleated wool and cancan ruffles, there was a kind of silly one, like the — what to call them? — suspended skirts. Imagine a flimsy tube hung from straps over the shoulders that looks like a cross between an apron and a weightlifter’s onesie (or a tote bag for the body) and sags just below the belly, and you’ll get the idea.

And for every great ladylike jacket, for every single-breasted suit coat, there was a bloomer: short, puffy and with elastic at the waist and legs like a pull-on diaper. They may be, as Simons insisted backstage, “a Prada thing since forever”; a remembrance of childhoods past. But they are also infantilizing — not really a desirable quality in a survival guide to dress and contemporary existence.

Still, even the failed ideas underscored that fact that at least Prada and Simons have ideas. Sometimes they are brilliant ideas and sometimes they are silly ideas, but either way, the designers have the gumption to try them out. It’s a rarer occurrence than one might like to think in fashion. And it is also why the brand occupies such a mythic place in the styleverse, and why what may seem inexplicable from the outside still gets so many hosannas in the room.

In any case, one point was clear: A pair of satin opera gloves in your back pocket, and you’re pretty much ready for anything.

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