043: Why I Collect Prada Fall 2007

"The cheap coat. The vulgar color."

Blacken The Black was a German band with virtually almost no footprint on the internet today beyond their self-titled album, which was released in 2007. Other than that, it’s as though they never existed. I have to look up their label Echokammer to glean very little details on what they were about. Their music is incredible, like a meeting of the sunniest of surf rock with the darkest elements of electronic music. The first song on the album is called “Murder” and it opens with the DJ and singer Annika Line Trost chanting, “Mardan, mardan.” It sounds a lot like “Murder, murder,” and is often mistaken for so, but there’s a difference: the latter means to die in Persian, the former is ever so slightly more malevolent.

Runway looks from Fall 2007

For Prada’s Fall 2007 collection, the models first stomp out to “Murder” which then transitions to three other songs by Blacken The Black: “Blacken the Black”, “Ding Dong”, and “Entrance to the Exit”. The show closes with the models doing a triumphantly loop to “Murder” once again, with Sasha Pivovarova leading the elegantly alien pack. Alien to a degree because several are styled in hats that produce an effect of elongating the top of the head, not unlike how humans imagine our extraterrestrial friends (or foes, depending on who you’re asking). Some wear skirts, jackets, and dresses which conjure an image of bubbling space gunk, or festering pools of nuclear soup depicted in children’s cartoons. There are knits made from mohair that look like a stuffed animal’s fur after it’s been through the dryer on high heat – I know this, because my mother accidentally did this once – which incidentally made a return to the runway for Miu Miu’s Fall 2024 collection.

Is this putting you off yet? If not, there were plenty of shag rug-textured coats and sweaters, and the colors were out of this world: putrescent Frankenstein green, high fructose corn syrup orange, high voltage blue, and pastels were the antithesis of sweetly serene. Offsetting these bizarre elements were their canvases of smart shift dresses, sharp jackets, slim trousers, and skirts that follow the lines of the body and taper at the knees. The foundation was elegance personified and without their eccentricities they would’ve been tasteful and boring clothes, and without the grounding components of the collection, total pandemonium. Miuccia Prada is the diviner of balance, finding a happy medium between chaos and sophistication.

The first piece I bought from this collection was a gooey-green and grey coat that turns bulbous around the hips, but cut in the style of a typical single-breasted coat. And while I’m painfully self-conscious of my hips, the matelassé is a welcome addition, taking the site of at least one woman’s vulnerabilities and recasting it to stubbornly declare, “Who cares?” I found the coat on eBay many, many years ago, and bought it for a song. It is undoubtedly the most fantastic piece of clothing I own, and have worn it so much that some threads have begun to fray. One time I walked into the Prada store in Soho, and a sales associate asked if it was Dries (whom I also love). I turned my nose high up in the air and replied, “No, it’s Prada.”

What was missing though, I thought, was a hat to wear with it. No ordinary hat would do, however, but hats from this collection are rather hard to come by. But when there’s a will, there’s a way. I began stalking through my regular resale sites and when nothing showed up, I moved on to Grailed, where I hunt for more esoteric pieces. And what luck, a hat to stretch back and extend my head! If I wear the coat without the hat, I feel naked; the chapeau transforms the look from interesting to amusingly absurd.

Miuccia Prada’s insight into Prada’s Fall 2007 collection, as relayed to Style.com’s Sarah Mower, was as such: "Eh! The only thing I could think of was to work on color and materials. Something simple but strange." Mrs. P’s work characteristically serves as a meditation on the times we live in. In the lead-up to Fall 2007, a global shift to the right was on course, America was in the middle of the Bush administration’s catastrophic second term, Italy’s Berlusconi was making political gains, not to mention we were edging towards one of the worst global recessions since the Great Depression (goodbye college savings!). And who can forget that Pluto was demoted as a planet. There are times when Prada’s collections are empowered celebrations of liberties and autonomy, but the impetus for this show was something subdued – albeit undoubtedly electrifying – and somewhat clairvoyant. Perhaps it was a reflection of the designer’s own interiority at the time.

Simple but strange is Prada’s modus operandi. The designer is revered for her subversion of expectations, of not succumbing to normative dictums of women’s fashion. If she’s expected to churn out “sexy” clothing, she sends sheer flasher’s macs and chainmail dresses down the runway with woolen sweaters and tweed skirts worn under. If she’s to use lace, it’s more funereal chic than D&G.

It’s the simple but strange-ness of Fall 2007 that was love at first sight for me. On myself, I gravitate towards relatively simple and classic cuts, but there must be a weirdness about it. Very few designers understand the complexities that inhabit a woman, which makes sense given that the vast majority of designers who have the power and resources to evolve the one-dimensional understanding of women in the fashion industry are white men. Some of us are weird, many of us are indignant, but many designers fail to recognize and appeal to what goes on beyond a woman’s surface.

For me, a coat is never just a coat; it can communicate feelings, emotions, and memories. I turned seventeen soon after this collection was presented, and my life was in a state of flux. The pieces that I own tell a story of my evolution, the freedom in not conforming to the unrelenting societal standard of how a woman should be. Mrs. Prada discerns that we have more to say.

Cathy Horyn’s hilarious review of Fall 2007.