Miuccia Prada has put the spruce, starched white crispness of nurses’ uniforms on to the catwalk at Milan fashion week, and said backstage that the show was “very much about politics”.
Prada and her co-creative director, Raf Simons, said they wanted to “give importance to real jobs” by crafting elegant, beautiful interpretations of workers’ uniforms, which they described as “sartorial representations of the beauty of care, of love, of reality … of responsibility”.
“There is the notion in fashion that only glamour is important – I hate that, I have always fought against it,” said Prada. “For me, for political reasons, right now I am very much focused on reality. What I care about is modest jobs.” With strikes making headlines across Europe, the celebration of workers had an unmistakable symbolism. Prada, who studied for a PhD in political science before becoming a fashion designer, was for a time a member of the Italian Communist party.
