July 1, 2005

It felt like the early '80s all over again. Giorgio Moroder was on the soundtrack; pointy shoes and square-shouldered, shiny suits were on the catwalk, with jacket sleeves pushed up the way Duran Duran used to wear them. A graphic for a top and a tie looked suspiciously like Karl Lagerfeld as seen by Patrick Nagel, the artist who designed the album sleeve for Simon LeBon and Company's Rio. And the naive star pattern that surfaced at Prada's signature show earlier in the week reappeared here in a sharper, more sophisticated form, derived from the motifs of Memphis, the furniture designers who ruled Milan in the first half of the '80s.

According to Miuccia herself, though, the crux of the collection was "a white T-shirt and gray pants"—in other words, a palette-cleansing simplicity. But you can't build a whole show on that. So the T-shirt and pants were surrounded by other statements, like the collarless shirts with tiny tab closings (which emphasized her boyish models' youthful necks) and the sleeveless shirts (which emphasized youthful arms) and the not-quite-matching jacket-and-trouser combos (the top would be dull, the bottom shiny, or vice versa, and they'd be a few tones out color-wise). These were actually a pretty accurate reflection of the way real kids in any era dress up.

— Tim Blanks