By Aaron Kok - published
Prada has always understood how the ordinary can feel exalted when pushed through the brand’s lens: a nylon backpack, a prim skirt, a librarian cardigan, a shoe that looks sensible until it becomes faintly perverse. Under Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the House has continued to treat fashion as a system of thought. Sure, it’s also about creating shirts and bags that people ultimately want to buy, but Prada can always be counted upon to stir up a dialogue on the ‘what’s and ‘why’s behind how we dress. For spring/summer 2027 menswear, presented in Milan, that system was narrowed to one of the season’s sharpest points yet.
Titled “Clarity”, the collection explored the idea of cleanliness, which as a premise on paper, sounded almost aggressively simple: jeans, jean jackets, T-shirts, blazers, leather blousons and so on. These are the sort of garments that have passed through so many lives, subcultures and shop floors that they have become almost invisible. Prada’s trick was to make them visible again by redirecting attention back onto cut, material and attitude.
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At its core, this was a collection about jeans without becoming a sermon on denim. In fact, one of its most deliciously contrarian moves was the absence of classic indigo denim. The ubiquitous jeans was present as an idea, but its blue-collar archetype had been lifted out of its expected fabric and made to perform elsewhere.
From the opening look, the argument was clear: A cream jean jacket and matching five-pocket trousers were worn under a charcoal blazer, collapsing the casual and the formal into one exact proposition. The familiar five-pocket template became the collection’s recurring grammar, appearing in shades of berry, brown and yellow, as well as in printed patterns that had the crisp, graphic optimism of mid-century interiors. Elsewhere, the same silhouette was reimagined in leather or a Prince of Wales check. The effect was sly, as if Prada and Simons are asking whether the shape of a jean jacket could survive its own displacement.
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The answer was yes, and often with a wonderfully odd charge. The trousers were hyper-narrow, low-slung and exacting, bringing back the skinny fit with a severity that felt provocative in an age of barrel-trousered men obsessed with sculpting their bodies to Greek deity perfection. Here, these clothes seemed to insist on another kind of freedom: the freedom of refusal, of choosing one line and following it ruthlessly. The jackets were cropped and taut, sometimes cut with the familiarity of a Type 3 denim jacket, sometimes reduced until they felt like shirts with a stubborn architectural will. On the body, the proportions produced a boyish tension: part mod, part post-punk, part laboratory technician who has wandered into a rock club and decided to stay.
The most compelling pieces were those that made the construction itself part of the drama. In translucent white nylon organza, jackets and trousers exposed their own internal logic, seams and structure suddenly made visible like a building with its scaffolding left on purpose. It was peak Prada: clinical, a little awkward, and far more sensual than they first appeared.
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Colour carried its own low-level mischief, moving through antique whites, burgundy, acid tones of green and yellow seemed to resist easy glamour. A Pepto Bismol-pink pair of skinny trousers could have been cartoonish elsewhere, but at Prada it became a kind of intellectual candy. The patterned sweater vests, meanwhile, brought back that familiar Prada tension between bad taste and perfect timing. Worn with plunging V-necks that dropped dramatically towards the torso, they turned the professorial into something louche and slightly edgier.
Notably, there were female models on the runway too, though they were camouflaged to blend in with the men, and this simple gesture of casting deepened the collection’s point without turning it into a laboured statement. These clothes did not need to be softened or masculinised depending on the body wearing them because their universality came from their stubborn simplicity. A jean jacket, a T-shirt, a blazer, a trouser: these are not neutral garments, but they are democratic ones, shaped by decades of use and misuse.
What made the show resonate was its austerity of intent. At a time when fashion can often mistake spectacle for substance, Prada and Simons chose to exercise discipline, and the collection worked like a repeated sentence with one word changing each time: first jeans in cotton, then in leather, or checks, or translucent nylon. The repetition intentionally felt rigorously tightened. And that, ultimately, was the intelligence of the collection: this is a concentration of what makes our classic clothing loved time and again.